Northwest Arkansas’ only professional regional theater, TheatreSquared, will be debuting a brand new stage adaptation of Linda Bloodworth Thomason’s television classic “Designing Women,” adapted for the stage by Thomason. The announcement was made Sunday at the theater company’s annual season preview celebration.
“It was a show that was the rare outlier in that it portrayed people in the South … as totally with it, of the moment, entrepreneurial people who were just defining their role in society around themselves, not around, for instance, something that was happening in a major urban center or — in this case — around men,” said T2’s Executive Director Martin Miller of the cultural significance of the television series, which was nominated for countless Emmy Awards during its run. “These were empowered women.”
Miller says the new stage production will feature the same beloved characters.
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“It takes place right now, and the women are the same age they were when we last saw them,” he says. “It’s as if this wonderful group of women that we’ve come to know and love were living today in the era of #metoo and Kim Kardashian and a recent female candidate who garnered the most votes for president of the United States. A lot has changed, and a lot remains the same, and I think Linda felt, and we feel as well, that it will be really interesting to hear what these women have to say today.”
Miller says the connection between the theater and Thomason was made when Thomason’s husband, Harry, visited Fayetteville’s Nightbird Books upon the occasion of the release of his memoir, “Brother Dog: Southern Tales and Hollywood Adventures.”
“Linda and Harry, who directed many of the episodes of ‘Designing Women’, both have Fayetteville roots,” he explained. “Harry went to the University of Arkansas.”
The production will debut in Fayetteville in August, and, Miller said, will travel to several high-profile venues after that, including the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the Dallas Theater Center and Little Rock’s Arkansas Rep.
“So there will be tens of thousands of audience members for a production created right here in Northwest Arkansas,” says Miller.
To hear more about what Miller and T2 Marketing and Communications Director Joanna Sheehan Bell have to say about this news, please listen to the What’s Up! podcast that accompanies this story.