Crushing Grain

by Bill Fountain

Presented by Level Ground Arts

November 19 - 28

at Dallas Hub Theater
2809 Canton St.
Dallas, TX 75226
877-238-5596

$15-$25

8pm Thu-Sat
Runtime: 75 minutes

Dallas playwright/director Bill Fountain was born two years after the JFK assassination, but in his latest play, Crushing Grain, he explores his fascination with the event from the perspective of the presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Or is that who the man in the hospital pajamas really is?

A native of Pleasant Grove, a rugged neighborhood in far East Dallas, Fountain has burst onto the Dallas theater scene this year as a director with his Level Ground Arts company. Now based in the Dallas Hub Theater in Deep Ellum—a rugged neighborhood near downtown—Level Ground started the year with an edgy production of Julius Caesar and recently ended a sold-out run of Evil Dead: The Musical, the most successful show the Hub stage has ever hosted.

With the world premiere of Crushing Grain, Fountain, 43, continues a busy schedule of writing, producing, directing and teaching (he’s a Catholic middle school drama teacher by day and also teaches at the Dallas Summer Musicals workshops). The multi-media man also draws comic books and graphic novels. The title of his theater company comes from “Level Ground,” a comic strip he started drawing for the White Rock neighborhood newspaper when he was just 13 and continued for 20 years.

Fountain’s previous plays, produced at several Dallas theaters, include Hecate Hill, Disturbance at White Rock Lake and In Defense of Better Days.

TheaterJones dropped in on a Crushing Grain rehearsal the other day and found Fountain bubbling with excitement (sorry) about the show, which opens Friday, November 19. We also got a brief scene on video with its star, Dallas actor Nick Jones, in character as Lee/Alec.

TheaterJones: What is the concept behind Crushing Grain? And why did you write it?

Bill Fountain: The concept is that you have a man who wakes up in what appears to be a Russian hospital or possibly the Texas Theater in Oak Cliff (where Oswald was arrested the day JFK was shot in 1963). But he is very confused. He might be Oswald. He might be someone else. It might be five years prior to the Kennedy assassination or it might be tomorrow. And there are forces at work to find out the truth. There are also monsters without faces: JFK, Saddam Hussein, water boarding, the bending of time and space, a live soundtrack and an odd romance.

But that’s really just the surface of what’s happening. The play is really very much about me, to be honest. I wrote the play during the last six months of my dad’s life as he was struggling in and out of hospitals with pancreatic cancer. It started out as a really wild and strange discourse on how white bread is made and how similar the process is to the assassination of JFK. But it soon became apparent to me in writing it that it was about what was happening to my life as my dad started to slip away from me. The more I wrote, the harder it was to believe what was coming out and soon I had this play in front of me that for the longest time terrified me. It took almost a year to work up the nerve to revisit the work and once I did, I became convinced it was something I had to tackle creatively. Crushing Grain emerged as this dragon I desperately wanted to face and slay by bringing it to life. In so many ways, it gave this voice to everything I felt during those really dark months and gave me so much hope for being able to cope with the aftermath.

Tell us about your research for the play. And was there a certain part of the story that has always fascinated you?

I had always been fascinated with all the conspiracy theories, but when I got serious about putting it together, I became really fascinated with the way that facts were distorted or filtered to serve whatever theory was being presented. It was interesting to me that the “facts” were so flexible. The part of the story that has always fascinated me and still fascinates me is Oswald defecting to the Soviet Union and his time there in the hospital following a botched suicide attempt. Also Oswald’s attempt to kill General Walker. I think more than anything, I’ve always been fascinated with how Oswald is documented and remembered with this sort of duality of character. He’s bad at this. He’s an expert at this. He’s terrible at that. He’s amazing at that. It’s really mindboggling how people perceived him so completely differently during his lifetime.

Who killed JFK?

Great question. I have no clue. Neither does anybody else. That is really one of the central points of my play. We weren’t there so we won’t ever know. The puzzle pieces do not all fit nor will they ever. It looks like Oswald was the guy who did it. I think so much of the conspiracy theories come from the fact that it’s really hard to accept that it was that horribly simple. We want it to be much more deep and complicated but in the end it looks like it was really one guy who had some issues, and a really decent vantage point and a loaded gun. I think we want so much for things to all make sense sometimes, and sometimes they just don’t.

Except for John Logan’s play Jack Ruby: All American Boy, done at Dallas Theater Center in the 1970s, no other Dallas theater production has ever addressed this city's most famous event. Why haven't there been more plays about this moment in history?

Maybe it’s because it’s really a very challenging thing to attempt here, so close to it. I know it was very chilling and spooky for us to do our photo shoot at the grassy knoll with our lead actor, Nick Jones, looking very much like Oswald. It’s very close to the bone here in Dallas.

What do you hope audiences come away with from Crushing Grain?

I would hope that people leave the theater thinking about how sometimes the answers don’t fit the questions. I think that’s what I learned in writing and directing the play. Sometimes we look for answers to questions that have no answers and we grasp at anything that might fill the gap; whether it’s the magic bullet that shot a president or the magic bullet that will cure cancer. There is no magic bullet and sometimes there are no answers. At least none that make sense.

Going back to Evil Dead: The Musical, what's been the outcome of that very successful production for you? Getting bites to direct and debut other new musicals?

We have been really fortunate that word went as far as it did about the show. I did get some emails and phone calls about taking on and debuting some equally outrageous and completely amazing new musicals as a result of the buzz on Evil Dead, which was extremely flattering and exciting. I wish I could say the names of them, but we are still getting everything secured rights-wise. I had to put off announcing our season till we got everything squared away. The cool thing is all three of the musicals we are thinking about are just as insane and fun and over the top as Evil Dead, maybe even more so. I can’t wait to talk more about it. Another outcome of Evil Dead has been this incredible new group of theatergoers we got to come to the show and try live theater out.

Why was Evil Dead such a hit with patrons who weren't typical theatergoers? You had SRO performances almost every weekend.

Evil Dead films are beloved by so many people. Many of the people who came out to see the musical had not been to live theater previously, but came because it was based on the Raimi films. The cool thing was how much they loved the theatrical experience and decided to come back for other shows. I was really surprised at how much the audience was made up of people who had little or no interest in live theater before the show, but afterwards were anxious to go see more plays.

What's the budget for Crushing Grain?

Thirty grand. Oh, wait. That was what I was hoping it would be. Sorry. We spent about $200 for wood for the set. There is no telling how much money each cast member spent to help out. Especially our Stage Manager Jessica Stevens, who bought us all breakfast every Sunday or our lead guy Nick Jones who drove back and forth from Austin (he's in college there) to do rehearsals.

Tell me what you think of Dallas' growing number of "fringe groups" doing theater in places like the Hub, the Ochre House and other venues. And how do you grow an audience for it?

It’s an awesome sign of the times to have so much diversity and variety of theater groups actively putting out incredibly great shows all the time. There are so many awesome things happening out there and so much creativity. I think you grow an audience by making them aware of what’s out there and where they can find it. Nothing on earth beats word of mouth for helping theater groups discover their audiences. My experience has been that if you communicate effectively what it is that you are all about and what you are working on, your audience will not only find you but help bring other people to you.