My Return to the Hip Pocket Theatre

 Through a strange series of events this past year, I have been reunited with the HIP POCKET THEATRE in Fort Worth, Texas, for whom I worked designing and acting in several productions from the mid 1970's until the late 1980's. This past October the Theatre hosted a "Film Fest" featuring videotaped versions of shows in which I happened to appear in 1985 and 1986. As an added introduction PEGGY BOTT KIRBY and I appeared on the current Hip Pocket stage as characters we had last played 30 years ago! Here in the photo are Ms. Bott-Kirby and myself as Meema and her nephew Arthur Clinton Bostick. The first showing of the three night festival was...

ADVENTURES WITH JUNE & SCOTTY from 1985. In which she and I first played these two characters, members of an extremely strange extended family, based on playwright JOHNNY SIMONS' own boyhood growing up around Lake Worth in north Fort Worth. We staged this play Upstairs at the White Elephant, a space above the historic saloon in the heart of old cowtown in Fort Worth. It was my first production as designer up there, a room about 50 feet square that I have blogged about before as being "painfully intimate". Johnny surprised me by bringing out this rendering of the set for the show...I had completely forgotten I had even done it!

The Film Fest was a great success, helping to showcase the archives of recorded plays, music, design artwork and printed programs and photographs, as well as physical props and costumes which still survive from 40 years of a local theatrical institution that has been THE HIP POCKET THEATRE.

Our aim is to digitize all of this vast array and make our work available to every theatre artist via the internet for study. An immense task, to say the least. I am doing my small part here, but there is So Much More!

Beginning next week...after 30 years, I am going to document here my designs and building of a production for the Hip Pocket's 39th season in 2015. The play is a staged version of the Classic and Acadamy Award winning 1953 film "LILI".

 I had wanted to do this back in the 1980's, but it never came to fruition. Now I've been given a second chance and I have re-imagined the story with a more modern sensibility. Not a by-the-numbers staging of the film, but a very unique play based on the material. My script has been approved and we open next August 14th  under the stars out at the new HPT location.

The first step for me is the design and construction of  4  Very Special Puppets,  as anyone familiar with the original work will understand. I began work on these three weeks ago, and I will be blogging about every step of their construction in the next few weeks...