Theater saved Franky D. Gonzalez.
Raised by his mother in a basement apartment in Queens and later a North Texas trailer park, the prolific Colombian American writer is now playwright-in-residence at Bishop Arts Theatre Center, where three of his works have been produced since he ed the company in 2021. The latest, his adaptation of the Ibsen classic Hedda Gabler, is running through next weekend.
Gonzalez has penned 40 plays. He’s been produced in the theater capitals of New York and Chicago. At 33, he’s just getting started.
“My wife makes a joke all the time,” he explains in a Zoom interview. “She says, ‘I would have never gotten with you if I’d have known you were already taken.’ I wake up thinking about Act 2, Scene 3. But she’s very ive. I love her to death for dealing with me.”
Growing up in a low-income household, Gonzalez has struggled with obesity, estrangement from his father and three suicide attempts, the last on Christmas Eve of 2009. His story reads like a movie, or one of his biographical plays. In fact, he’s written about it all, most directly in a series of one-man shows.
In Paletas de Coco, developed in Jonathan Norton’s playwriting workshop at Dallas Theater Center, he follows his life’s journey across four Christmas Eves, including the last time he saw his now-deceased father and the day his son was born. During the pandemic, he performed Paletas online as part of the off-Broadway theater group Ars Nova’s ANT Festival.
In Heart Stop or, The Obesity Play, Gonzalez talks about reaching 400 pounds and the time he stopped breathing in his sleep. It was developed in a series of residencies, conferences and workshops, including at the prestigious Berkeley Rep in California.
He’ll complete the trilogy of solo shows with Tomorrow You Will Be Happier, a commission from the Indianapolis-based New Harmony Project. It deals with forgiveness.
“My father and I did not have a great relationship,” Gonzalez says. “If nothing else, I will always credit him with having given me the resilience to deal with the rejection that artists have to deal with all the time. He was an alcoholic, and the burden of fatherhood was a lot for him. The burden of being a husband was a lot for him. And he had things happen to him that I don’t know if I could survive. He is an outsized presence in my life. Much of everything that I do is in an attempt to not be him, but also try to understand where guys like him came from. They didn’t get a fair shake.”
Gonzalez has known he wanted to be a writer since he was 4. But he didn’t find his path to theater until his junior year at Denton High School, when a teacher handed him three plays: Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Lorca’s Blood Wedding.
“I read them in a night, and I knew this is it, this is all I’ve ever searched for,” he says. “I have studied play after play. I’ve read through all of Shakespeare’s canon. I read through the Great American classics. I dove in and immersed myself in it.”
When he was a teenager, Gonzalez and his mother moved to Central Florida. Then they landed in North Texas by chance. He says she picked where they were going next by blindfolding herself and stabbing at a U.S. map with a pen.
“I was like, ‘Wow, what would’ve happened if you’d hit New York? She said, ‘That’s a do-over.’ ‘What would’ve happened if you’d hit Florida?’ ‘That’s another do-over.’ ‘And Alaska, too? I ain’t doing that cold.’ That’s how we ended up in Texas. We were always moving, escaping poverty or trying to get away from stuff getting really bad.”
Gonzalez flashes that kind of dark humor, which turns up in his plays, while also speaking calmly and forthrightly. His only full-length comedy, Escobar’s Hippos, deals with what happens when one of the large animals arrives in a Colombian river town to wreak havoc. Soon the townspeople are transforming into hippos themselves.
It’s a reference to a true story — the drug lord Pablo Escobar introduced hippos to Colombia, sparking an ecological crisis — and is also an homage to Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinoceros and Gonzalez’s weight issues.
He received his theater degree from the University of North Texas in 2013, but says he didn’t gain his purpose in life until his son was born two years later. Though none of his plays were produced until 2018, he had found in his boy the audience he always wanted to speak to.
“I wondered to myself, could I have avoided some of the biggest mistakes in my life if I’d have known my father’s story, if I’d have known the story of the past?” Gonzalez says. “Could I have avoided this present that I am in right now with the regrets that I have?”
He’s written multiple plays about prison inmates and boxers, based on men he knew growing up who were literally fighting their way out of their circumstances. That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven, about four Latino boxers seeking the world title, had its premiere in 2023 and won the Chicago theater community’s Jeff Award last year.
Gonzalez landed the residency at Bishop Arts Theatre Center after executive artistic director Teresa Coleman Wash saw him performing monologues at the Aviary, the now defunct Dallas play development group.
In A Dallas Hedda, he has relocated Ibsen’s dissatisfied, manipulative protagonist to a North Dallas suburb, where she’s the daughter of the founder of a Christian college, to explore the modern theater pioneer’s themes of heritage, class and the struggle for personal freedom.
In the original, all the characters are white. In Gonzalez’s version, Hedda’s husband is Black, her ex-lover Latino.
“Hedda Gabler is about the desire for something beyond what you have been assigned in life,” he says. “Humans have to deal with a terrible thing called expectation. Expectation is a promise that has been made on our behalf, especially for women at the time. I wanted to see how those expectations that people have based on their background, their circumstances economically, racially and ethnically, how that stacks up if their ethnic backgrounds change, if their racial backgrounds change. I wanted to take that critique and make it uniquely American and uniquely southern, Dallas specifically. It’s about the search for desire in this comedy of manners we exist in called society.”
His 2023 play for Bishop Arts Theatre Center, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Othello, also dealt with race and expectations in the contemporary world. It’s set in the locker room of a Dallas football team that has hired the first female head coach, who’s also Black and involved with the team’s much younger wide receiver. It worked perfectly.
“Othello is a Venetian man who has to deal with people who are not just against him because of him being Black, but because he’s married this woman who’s so much younger,” Gonzalez says. “In our society now, we are more prone to act like the characters in Othello if we see the reverse: a woman of a certain age with a man much younger than her. I needed to find something that might make audiences go, ‘Whoa,’ in the same way that they would have gone, ‘Whoa,’ for Othello in Shakespeare’s time. I need to have a personal stake.”
Details
A Dallas Hedda runs through May 10 at Bishop Arts Theatre Center, 215 S. Tyler St. $20-$30. bishopartstheatre.org.
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