One of my fave actresses, Regina Taylor, who is also a playwright, has a new play that debuted in Dallas last week. I've heard great things about it and will check it out next week. After it's run in Dallas it will go to Chicago.

Regina is a very talented actress who starred in I'll Fly Away with Sam Waterston. I loved that show. She's originally from Oak Cliff in Dallas and graduated from SMU (hey Rodeo and ThreadCula).

If you're in Dallas or Chicago I urge you to support this awesome talent.

Her earliest professional acting roles were two made-for-television films while she was studying at Southern Methodist University: 1980's Nurse and 1981's Crisis at Central High. In the latter movie, she was praised by critic John O'Connor of The New York Times for her portrayal of Minnijean Brown, a member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who braved violence and armed guards to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957.[3] Her first role to gain widespread attention was that of Mrs. Carter, the drug-addicted mother of a promising young female student, in the 1989 film Lean on Me. She is well known for her role as Lilly Harper on the early 1990s TV series I'll Fly Away. This role won her a Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Television Drama and also an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series.

Since then she has had some critical success for various supporting roles in films, such as the Spike Lee film Clockers, Courage Under Fire, A Family Thing, The Negotiator, and for the telefilms Losing Isaiah and Strange Justice — a Showtime original film in which she portrayed Anita Hill — and as the lead in the PBS telefilm Cora Unashamed, based on a Langston Hughes short story. She was a cast member for all four seasons of the CBS drama The Unit as Molly Blane, the tough-minded housewife who holds the women of 'the Unit' together when their men are on covert assignments.

I've always thought she was a really attractive lady and her voice is so serene. Love her!

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http://www.dallastheaterc...php?sid=12

World Premiere
November 5-December 5, 2010
By Regina Taylor
Directed by Ethan McSweeny
Potter Rose Performance Hall
Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre
A Co-Production with Goodman Theatre

LOYALTY, BETRAYAL... FAMILY.
Regina Taylor’s powerful new trilogy (Jarfly, Rain and Ghost(story)) explores the unique passages in one woman’s life journey. In Jarfly, a teenaged Iris Spears teeters on the brink of maturity when an event shatters her innocence—and changes her life forever. In Rain, a 34-year-old Iris flees a collapsing marriage to return home to Texas and the comfort of her mother’s embrace, only to find that the once-solid ground has shifted beneath her feet. And in Ghost(story), a surprise visit from her estranged husband forces Iris to confront the past and the ghosts that have continued to haunt her. The trilogy is inspired by the rhythm of the cicada—a part of Iris’ young life in the south—the insect that emerges every 17 years to take wing. The Trinity River Plays are presented as one continuous story in three acts.

Recipient of the 2010 Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award

Finally saw this last night and it was da bomb! Wow, I had no idea Regina Taylor was such an excellent, talented playwright. Got a chance to participate in a discussion afterwards with the actors and playwright. Amazing! The show will be in Chicago starting in January. If you can, I highly recommend you check it out.

Penny Johnson, who played the first lady in 24, plays the mother in this play. Great nuanced performance. Everyone was outstanding.

The actress, currently playing the mother in Dallas Theater Center's The Trinity River Plays, played evil first lady Sherry Palmer during the first three seasons of 24 . That role on the Fox hit made a huge impression on the national consciousness. Many observers have said that seeing a black first couple helped open the door to President Barack Obama's election."I do believe that before Barack and Michelle, there was David and Sherry," Jerald says.

The series depicted the president as noble and intelligent, but his wife was the most conniving political spouse since Lady Macbeth. "You know, it's actually a beautiful way to be identified," Jerald says. "The worst words they could use – like the B-word – were the highest praise."

Of course, Jerald, 49, has been extremely busy on-screen since she moved to Los Angeles not long after finishing the Juilliard School's acting program. She also was a series regular on The Larry Sanders Show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and ER , and she has played former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice twice.

Jerald does a lot of stage work in Los Angeles – running an issue-based theater to benefit her church and directing for larger professional companies. Her theater hardly fits the church-lady stereotype, though. It tackles difficult subjects, and the shows Jerald directs elsewhere include vehicles such as the sexually frank The Vagina Monologues.

She recently took a year off to pitch her own TV series, Baltimore, about four powerful female politicians. She also earned certification as a paralegal in a challenge designed to motivate her grown daughter.

Unlike the other actors in The Trinity River Plays , Jerald is not seen at regional theaters around the country. She makes it a rule not to be separated from her husband of 27 years, musician Gralin Jerald, for more than two weeks. The main reason she made an exception is that her character, Rose, has ovarian cancer. It's a topic dear to the actress's heart, since Jerald and her husband cared for his mother when she learned she had the disease.

Jerald agreed to the role only a short while before rehearsals started in Dallas. Most of the other performers had been with the project since its early days in workshops. "I'm the new girl. I'm the TV girl," Jerald says.

Playwright Regina Taylor, who partly based the character Rose on her own mother, had a single question to ask: Does Jerald garden? (Rose's garden is her dearest activity.) The actress responded yes – she has a farm in Virginia.

Little did Jerald know at the time that she would spend the first 20 minutes of the play perched in a tree in Rose's garden, or that the project would grow from the single play Rain to a three-hour-plus trilogy.

"I had to prepare my husband for that tree before he saw a performance of the show," the actress says. "He's so protective of me, I was worried what he might do if he thought it wasn't safe up there."

With The Trinity River Plays up and running, Jerald finds the experience moving.

"The final scenes in Rain are just like my mother-in-law when she would sit under the window in my sitting room – one foot in the other world and just holding on," she says. The scene in which Rose's daughter gently feeds her oatmeal from a spoon also resonates deeply, "because my mother-in-law tried till the end to do for herself."

Jerald looks forward to taking the show to Chicago's Goodman Theater in January and is curious whether all the Dallas references in the script will get a rise from the out-of-state audiences. She'll go out and give it her all, whatever happens. "Actors are adults playing hide-and-ego-seek," Jerald says. "I treat it as going on the playground and playing. It's still fun."Plan your life

There was also a cool moment during the second act, Rain, when they played Purple Rain.

Big fan of Ms. Taylor, I've seen her in some of playwright Pearl Cleage work also.

Loved, loved, loved, I'll Fly Away. Needless to say it should've had a longer run but you know we and others don't wanna deal with history and the truth.

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[Edited 12/5/10 13:43pm]

TD3 said:

Big fan of Ms. Taylor, I've seen her in some of playwright Pearl Cleage also.

Loved, loved, loved, I'll Fly Away. Needless to say it should've had a longer run but you know we and others don't wanna deal with history and the truth.

That's when I fell in love with Sam Waterston. I adore his voice.