‘Opera Box’ @ Ochre House Theater
Production photos by Trent Stephenson
—Martha Heimberg
Part melodramatic soap opera, part soap box polemic, Opera Box is a two-hour tragi-comedy-slapstick-farce, sometimes rhyming, set to music, with startling video and a puppet head the size of a bushel of apples under which an actor staggers. In other words, another wild and crazy (and surprisingly touching) premiere at Ochre House Theater, a company dedicated to original scripts and barely controlled mayhem.
Written and directed by OHT artistic director Matthew Posey, Opera Box tells the story of a contemporary dirt-poor Southern family struggling with opioid addiction and alcoholism, and beset by a series of floods “in the tri-state area” that threaten to wash everybody away before mama dies of a near lifelong illness or an overdose.
The show opens with white-headed mother Stark (Polly Maynard, somehow both pitiful and droll) huddled in a bed, stage center, with a huge bloodshot eye rolling behind her on a video screen. Posey also designed the set. Ominous music, composed and directed by Ian Mead Moore, fills the intimate 50-seat theater, and woeful Stark sings of her aching bones as she swills vodka, sniffs some crack from her bedside table, and shoots up with a handy hypodermic needle.
Husband Jon-Jon (morose Posey in overalls and full beard) sits down by his dying wife, who asks for a “coffin nail.” He manages to find a cigarette stub in his crushed pack of Camels. She lights up, and inhales deeply. “Out, out brief Camel,” Stark says, and we cringe appropriately at the silly pun. Jon-Jon is given to rants about the mistreatment of immigrant farmers, the closure of the local Piggly Wiggly, and a letter informing him they’re losing Medicare benefits. “F*** Trump!” he shouts. In case, you don’t know who inspired this play.
Their 40-year-old slutty daughter Hank (sexy, aggressively miserable Christina Cranshaw) wanders in after a four-day binge, and loving Stark helps shaky Hank shoot up between her toes. They have a sad but cozy moment of mother-daughter recognition that they share a slut gene.
Manny (a sweet-smiling Dante Martinez in a huge puppet head) visits Stark on her stoned sickbed, and Jon-Jon appears via video accusing this man, who he took in as his own son when the boy’s mother was deported, of turning them all into junkies. Ah, but before the night is out we learn that Stark and Jon-Jon bear a terrible secret of a past betrayal involving Manny—who, by the way, bumps his giant head into a wall as Jon-Jon remarks: “He does not know how to make an exit.”
More comic relief to the often nightmarish depiction of drug addiction comes in the form of the couple’s son Charlie (Tommy Stuart, in hilariously All-American white jerk mode) and his wife Ruby (properly prayerful Lauren Massey). Charlie, an unemployed electrician with a trade school diploma, blames all the evil in the world on Biden, wears his MAGA hat with pride, and drives everybody nuts arguing with his babbling wife and thanking God for the strength to travel to Mobile to get some rancid groceries for the family. “Grocery stores bring out the worst in humanity,” he reports. Really.
Charlie wants to move everybody to “higher ground” because the rain is pouring down and another flood is rising to drown out the meager homestead. What to do after you sing about rain? You have to see for yourself.
Amidst the chuckles and jokes, Posey delivers some powerfully moving lines about the weariness that comes from loving a dying woman who is also losing her mind. “She digs through her purse as if she were digging her own grave,” Jon-Jon says. And though I thought the play was over twice before it actually ended, I left the theater stirred by the simple strength of this poor family in a rough world, who keep on keeping on with no end of suffering in sight.
Kudos to lighting designer Kevin Grammer and costume designer Ryan Matthieu Smith; to the set/FX/scenic art from Justin Locklear, Izk Davies and Bobby Weiss (videographer Scott Shaddock); and to musicians Sarah Rogerson and Aaron Gonzales, who complete Ian Mead Moore’s stage-side trio.
WHEN: September 3-20, 2025
WHERE: 825 Exposition Avenue, Dallas
WEB: ochrehousetheater.org (or 214-826-6273)
