Two area museums celebrated important milestones this week. The Museum of Nature & Science on Wednesday broke ground on a new building at Victory Park. The new $80 million Fort Worth Museum of Science and History opens today. KERA’s Stephen Becker toured the new space.

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A sculpture called The Happy Family stands in the courtyard of the museum’s school. The piece features three cheerful blue figures, each balancing on one leg.

It’s an image that could serve as a metaphor for the whole institution.

With its dual science and history missions, the museum is by its very nature a balancing act.

Charlie Walter is responsible for finding the right interplay among the museum’s many purposes. He’s the executive vice president in charge of programming

WALTER:  “Some people love science, some people love history. Some people have small kids and want to go and have a hands-on experience. Other people want a more adult, aesthetic experience. So we think the building really strikes that balance. It was a balancing act, but the sweet spot is when you have different components that will appeal to different guests who walk through our door."

Skeletons of dinosaurs that lived in North Texas roam the DinoLabs downstairs. Another room details the Barnett Shale, the natural gas reserve that lies a mile beneath the museum’s floor.

Head upstairs, and you’ll find the Cattle Raisers Museum and the Fort Worth History Gallery. The latter space traces the city’s history through the development of the street car.

WALTER: “That’s what makes it so powerful. It’s a Fort Worth story, it’s Fort Worth-centric, it’s interpreting science and history right in your backyard. So any kiddo or adult can connect with it and then explore more right in your community. You can go down to Glen Rose and see the tracks right there in the river that these dinosaurs made. You see the energy production all around us.”

But that’s not to say the museum has limited itself to Fort Worth, or even Texas.

One of the highlights is CSI: The Experience, based on the hit TV show. It’s an interactive production created by the museum that travels the country.

Visitors observe one of three crime scenes involving a dead body. Through forensic science, good old fashioned detective work and the help of a few video-taped experts, you’ll gather clues to solve the case.

One of those experts teaches you to analyze blood spatter patterns.

EXPERT: “If an object has blood on it or is bleeding and is walking through a scene, drips will come off periodically, and when you look at the scene, what you’ll see is a trail. That indicates movement through that scene.”

Cool, yet kinda gross.

But just wait until you study your victim on the autopsy table.

EXPERT: “When cleaning and prepping the body, my assistant found more maggots."

Learning can be a dirty business.

Still, learning is the common thread that holds the museum together.

Sam Dean is a scientist based at one of Americas’ leading science museums, the  Exploratorium in San Francisco. He designed some of the children’s exhibits now on display in Fort Worth and says that the museum’s dedication to education is what sets it apart from other science museums.

SAM DEAN: “Learning comes to the forefront. And so the design of your building and exhibits all flow from that being the number one thing that’s important – learning and exploration, discovery, joy and whimsy. Those things are not easy to find in a lot of places.”

Beginning today, you can hunt for them in Fort Worth.

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The new Legorreta + Legorreta-designed Fort Museum of Science and History is open — a major upgrade in the Cultural District. It features a new planetarium, dinosaur exhibitions and mini-museums devoted to cattle, Fort Worth history, energy (basically, the oil and gas industry) and even the science of CSI. We talk with vice president of development Carl Hamm about balancing education with entertainment in this episode of Think. Think airs Fridays at 7:30 p.m. on KERA (Channel 13).

• Click here to listen to the KERA radio report about the museum.
• Click here to read about the museum's innovative planetarium.

Kent Williams as Mr. Argento with Tomas, his pet monkey

• Lawson Taitte's review for the Dallas Morning News

• Alexandra Bonifield's review for Critical Rant & Rave

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The Undermain Theater is presenting the world premiere of Len Jenkin’s dark comedy, Port Twilight. The play follows several storylines as they trail through the city – and all involve what might be called messages and 'alien contact.' Our narrator-guides to the city of Port Twilight are two out-of-work cabaret performers. They work day jobs at an outfit called OPME (Off-Planet Message Exchange), where they monitor interstellar radio noise for messages from other planets. A rogue biochemist angrily quits his job but soon gets hired by a cheesy filmmaker to work on his latest sci-fi script. It’s about travelling to another planet. And a despairing old rabbi, played by Bruce DuBose, wanders the city streets, peddling amulets and trying to call down the Messiah.

Ian Sinclair and Bruce DuBose, l to r

DUBOSE: “The desperate citizens of Port Twilight no longer believe in the holy names. They’ll starve me to death. No matter. After tonight, all will be changed and the End of Days will be upon us.”

Give a dozen designers the task of creating sets for all this, and the majority would try to replicate some aspect of the city, Port Twilight. They’d be foolish. They’d have to compete with playwright Len Jenkin’s fantastical language, the way his dialogue conjures a shadowy cityscape out of noir movies like Nightmare Alley. But then, his Port Twilight is also deeply surreal like something out of a Fellini film, with wax museums, an organ grinder and an old park –

DACK AND DONNA (the play's narrators): — “beyond the park, Raven Laboratories.
“And the limestone caves where gypsies live. Beyond the caves, the Dark Forest.”
“ Leopards.”
“Wolves.”
[Howling and music fade]

So – what John Arnone did for the Undermain production was skip the whole mythic city and delve straight into Jenkin’s sources of inspiration. Jenkin’s play is a sci-fi noir spinning out various futures: technological, religious and extraterrestrial. It mixes ancient Hebrew predictions with space maidens and genetic experiments. As a result, for the scenery, Arnone has wrapped the Undermain’s entire basement with a long canvas backdrop. He’s had it painted with big, bold images from movie posters, tattoo parlors, Mexican wrestlers' masks and Japanese comics (kudos to painters Linda Noland and Terry Hays). Even some of the scientific instruments used on stage are assemblages of Buddha heads, doll parts and vinyl hosing. The whole production has a neon, trash-culture aesthetic that suits both the play's noir and sci-fi elements, both the future and the decaying past. Think: extremely low-rent Bladerunner.

I’ve gone on about the production design like this partly because not many small stage companies have a Tony Award-winning designer like Arnone. And partly because so much of Port Twilight works on the level of texture, atmosphere and mood. It’s a mood of apocalyptic dread shot through with a vaudeville-baroque delight in theatricality and humor. At one point, we see a line of lab-coated scientists observing the orange flash of an explosion. The next time we see them, they’re a chorus line dancing stone-faced to the music of the “Science Dance.”

[music]

Jessica Cavanagh, Ariana Cook, Josh Blann and Christian Taylor, l to r

Directed by Katherine Owens, the Undermain’s production — everything from DuBose's music to Jeffrey Frank's video design — is a marvelous, funky, pop-culture collage. The cast is strong, including DuBose in two roles (rabbi and filmmaker), Kent Williams in a variety of comic cameos and Christian Taylor as a spookily opaque Messiah. Josh Blann has an electric presence as the spiked-hair biochemist, and Jonathan Brooks and Shannon Kearns-Simmons do a nice job, playing our showbizzy, tour-guide couple who can seem cheerful, sinister and clueless by turns.

The staging's only weaknesses are an occasional lack of poignance, of a human dimension that would let us feel something more for several of these characters, make them more than quick, comic types. A romance, for instance, between Blann's biochemist and a hired-academic screenwriter (Ariana Cook) seems to pop up out of nowhere. For his part, Jenkin has also researched and loaded in so many futuristic scenarios that the best Owens can do sometimes is just have characters stand there and swap ideas about mind-altering nanobots.

A nanobot is a microscopic machine. The theory is that thousands could eventually be injected directly into our brains and they’d shape our senses, our ideas. Language itself is a kind of mind-altering nanobot, and thanks to the Undermain, thanks to Len Jenkin’s language, Port Twilight makes for a haunting, mind-altering experience.

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More than 20 donations of a million dollars or more have been made to build the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Victory Park.

But with an estimated cost of $185 million, even million-dollar donations don’t take a huge chunk out of the bill.

Enter Ross Perot Jr.

At Wednesday’s groundbreaking ceremony for the new building, he recalled a conversation he had with the museum’s chief fundraiser, Forrest Hoglund. Hoglund suggested that Perot and his sisters take their mother, Margot, a former teacher, to see the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

PEROT: “And I think before mom even went into the building, just the school buses alone lined up with the school kids to go in that day, she was convinced this was something she wanted to do. And if you want to know how things work in our family, probably like yours, if your mother is on board, pretty much the rest of us are gonna follow.”

The trip ultimately netted a $50 million donation and the naming rights to the museum in honor of their parents, H. Ross and Margot Perot.

The museum isn’t scheduled to open until 2013. Fundraising continues, and they’re still about $60 million away from their goal.

But on Wednesday, several dozen kids saw demonstrations on gravity, wind power, light and other concepts they may learn about one day on field trips to the museum.

And Perot saw a vision of the future.

“We know that millions of children will go through the building every year … and I hope that with their dreams and aspirations, they will stay in Dallas, they will build their business in Dallas, and continue to build this fabulous economy that we call home.”

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A native of Peru, Fort Worth Symphony music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya has found a way to preserve and showcase the orchestral music of his country — and the other Latin American countries that were once part of the Incan Empire. He has started a series of concerts and recordings called Caminos del Inka — "Trails of the Incans." It features three centuries of music — from dance numbers written down by an 18th century Spanish cleric to Enrique Iturrigia's homage to Igor Stravinsky and contemporary Peruvian composers. The first CD was released earlier this year, titled Inti, the name of the sun in Quechua, the language of the Incans.

Harth-Bedoya has brought his multi-media presentation to other cities, including Chicago. But he returns to Bass Hall this weekend with the FWSO and a concert version.

Photo: brokenspokeaustintx.com

Art&Seek presents This Week in Texas Music History. Every week, we’ll spotlight a different moment and the musician who made it. This week, Texas music scholar Gary Hartman looks at one of the state's most famous dance halls.

You can also hear This Week in Texas Music History on Friday on KXT and Saturday on KERA radio. But subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss an episode. And our thanks to KUT public radio in Austin for helping us bring this segment to you.

And if you’re a music lover, be sure to check out Track by Track, the bi-weekly podcast from Paul Slavens, host of KERA radio’s 90.1 at Night.

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This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll look at a classic Texas dance hall that has become a world famous tourist destination.

On November 10, 1964, James White opened the Broken Spoke on South Lamar Blvd. in Austin. Originally, the Broken Spoke was just a café, but when customers began dancing to the music playing on the jukebox, White decided to expand the building to include a dance hall and stage. A number of legendary country musicians performed at the Broken Spoke in the early years, including Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Tex Ritter and Ray Price. During the progressive country music movement of the 1970s, a new generation of Texas artists played the hall, including Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Jerry Jeff Walker. More recently, Alvin Crow, George Strait, the Dixie Chicks, Asleep at the Wheel and countless others have graced the stage. The Broken Spoke has been featured in National Geographic, on PBS and in several major motion pictures. It continues to offer live music nightly, attracting crowds of local music fans, as well as busloads of tourists from all over the world.

Next time on This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll learn about a Texan who drew from Hispanic, Anglo and African-American influences to become one of the most well-respected jazz musicians of the 1940s and 1950s.

In the New York Times recently, Edward Rothstein wrote about the "sense of wonder" that the best science museums instill in visitors. He was reviewing San Francisco's Exploratorium and the California Academy of Sciences, which opened last year in Golden Gate Park.

Wonder is not puzzlement, bewilderment or confusion. But it is also not satisfaction, completion or understanding. It is more open-ended … In the wake of wonder, we are literally moved. We cannot remain still. We are spurred to explore.

The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History is frantically getting ready for its own opening November 20, so I can't speak to the success or failure of the new 166,000-square-foot facility, designed by Legorreta + Legorreta, the famous Mexico City architects. Dallasites should recognize their distinctive style from the Latino Cultural Center: big, bold shapes and Southwest colors, open courtyards and an 'urban lantern' tower. (The museum's donation project is even called Light the Lantern.) When I visited last week, most of the exhibit galleries were still under construction (coincidentally, one of those exhibitions is on tour from the Exploratorium.)

But one attraction was up and functioning — and it was filled with wonders. The museum's Noble Planetarium has the first Zeiss hybrid planetarium system in the Southwest. That insectoid-mechanoid piece of equipment up there is the "star projector" part of the system, the Skymaster ZKP-4. Forget your old grade-school visit when you got to see constellations light up overhead. The ZKP-4 is capable of showing thousands more stars than were previously displayed by planetariums (it projects both southern and northern hemispheres, for instance), and thanks to fiber optics, it shows them with far more clarity.

But that doesn't begin to convey how stellar this thing is. It's the online information that the Skymaster can access that makes it whoa-baby 'cosmic.'  Because of the huge amount of digital data compiled by places like NASA, the 'skies' that Skymaster shows us can be seen from almost any angle and in practically reach-out-and-touch detail. It zooms through the solar system, stops and pivots around individual planets, showing their daytime and nighttime sides. Then it can peer at them up-crater-close. And all of these images are kept fresh: You're seeing Jupiter's clouds from just a few days ago.

It's also the contexts, the ways of seeing these stellar wonders, that fascinate. At one point — as planetarium director Linda Krouse kindly put the equipment through some of its paces for us — the overhead images retreated from the solar system to reveal all the stars encircling Earth 10 light years away — it was shown as a red ball — and then we saw the larger ball of stars 100 light years around us. Pulling back even further, we saw that ball in relationship to the entire Milky Way galaxy. Let's get seriously small:  A single light year is nearly six trillion miles. So that circle of stars is six hundred trillion light years across. Yet with the Milky Way, it looked like a softball tucked under someone's arm.

When it comes to the more grounded and concrete realm of space displays, the entrance to the Noble will exhibit some of what Frank Zappa called "cosmic debris": The replica of NASA's Manned Maneuvering Unit (above) was still being unpacked. The MMU was the little rocket-powered easy-chair that astronauts used to zip around outside the Shuttle. There'll be a Sputnik, a meteorite, plasma screens with real-time images from both the Charlie Mary Noble Observatory at UNT and the Hubble Telescope.

Certainly, there are grander, more elaborate planetariums around. The Hayden in New York, let's face it, is awe-inspiring (it holds more than four times the Noble's 100-seat capacity). But there is something that distinguishes the Skymaster's software abilities.

It's live and interactive. It doesn't have to follow a set program.  The operator can veer off to answer specific questions. Our tour came to a slack-jawed halt as Krause took requests. Could she show us the Voyager missions? Up popped the paths of the space probes, arcs of light soaring out of the solar system. Cassini? Galileo? The Crab Nebula? Because the entire room seemed to shift and spin, my producer  had to flee the auditorium — the ZKP-4's cosmic leaps are dizzying.

Oh, the places you'll go. Come prepared with some suggestions on what you want to see. The Noble can pack a lot of universe into its little space.

Charles Dutton in Honeydripper

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On Saturday — for one night only — Charles Dutton performed his one-man show at Tarrant County College. It's  an autobiographical show — From Jail to Yale — Serving Time on Stage — and unlike many celebrities, Dutton has actually led a life well worth the recounting. But it wasn't his life story that made the evening so memorable.

People may know the Emmy Award-winning actor from TV shows like his old Fox sitcom Roc (he also directed the outstanding HBO mini-series, The Corner). But Dutton first made his name as an actor in the late August Wilson’s stage dramas, notably Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In 1990, I was lucky enough to see him on Broadway in Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.

In fact, Dutton and Wilson’s joint efforts were one of those rare moments in American theater history. A major new dramatist found his stage voice through a major new actor. It was like Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando. Or David Mamet and Joe Mantegna. Seriously: Dutton went a long way toward defining the Wilson protagonist, the young black male trying to fight his way out of the painful legacies of the past — his own, his family's, his race's. They are haunted, burdened but determined — sometimes tragically determined — men.

So getting to see Dutton in Tarrant County College’s Joe Rushing Theater — presented by the Fort Worth alumnae of Delta Sigma Theta — was a remarkable opportunity. Rushing has only 256 seats; it's not much larger than Theatre 3 in Dallas — that’s how intimate it was. Halfway through, you could see Dutton had already sweated through his shirt. That’s how hard he was working. The evening — as a coherent piece of theater — is pretty much two pieces with not much linkage: half-life story, half-acting-demo.

Dutton does have an amazing life story. A hard-knock child of the East Baltimore streets, he’s a twice-convicted felon — once for manslaughter, once for assaulting a prison guard. Yet he wound up graduating from the Yale School of Drama. His salvation was an anthology of black playwrights that he mistakenly grabbed just as he was being thrown into solitary confinement (he'd wanted to grab Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth). By the light filtering under his cell door, Dutton managed to read Douglas Turner Ward's comedy, A Day of Absence. He found the play so funny, he set about creating a theater troupe to stage it for the prison's talent show. Mercifully, as he noted, back then, we were still serious about rehabilating criminals instead of just incarcerating them: Dutton simply had to convince the warden he was serious by getting his GED. He eventually earned a two-year associate's degree.

Charles Dutton (left) in the Yale Rep premiere of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

But as engaging as all this was — and as entertaining as Dutton was in relating what must, to him, be very familiar stories — the real payoff came in the show’s second half. Dutton performed scenes from August Wilson’s dramas – including a sizable chunk of Ma Rainey, in which he played four different members of Ma's band. He also played Loomis from Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Boy Willie from The Piano Lesson. It was like watching George C. Scott at the top of his game take a walk through his greatest hits.

Dutton can be that compelling onstage. That's because in prison, what Dutton had discovered wasn’t just theater. From his very first performance, he realized he could command an audience’s attention. But his tremendous stage presence isn’t just a matter of his burly size or voice. It’s that he’s fearless and utterly committed to the part, even if it's a wise old storyteller like Toledo from Ma Rainey.

And on Saturday in Fort Worth, Dutton was spellbinding.

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When Calvin Littlejohn came to Fort Worth in 1934, North Texas was still Jim Crow country. Newspapers wouldn't print photos of African-Americans — unless, says Bob Ray Sanders, they'd murdered a white man or raped a white woman. Yet such segregation proved to be something of an opportunity for Littlejohn: He became the unofficial chronicler of black, middle-class Fort Worth life. The high school graduations and football games, the funerals, weddings and barbershops: Everything the mainstream media neglected, Littlejohn documented until his death in 1993.

Journalist Bob Ray Sanders — columnist for the Fort  Worth Star-Telegram and frequent visitor to KERA — has written Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White, which features more than 150 photos by Littlejohn. Sanders spoke to Krys Boyd about his lifelong friend, about growing up in segregated Fort Worth, about how Littlejohn came to pick up a camera.

You can also hear This Week in Texas Music History on Saturday on KERA radio. But subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss an episode. And our thanks to KUT public radio in Austin for helping us bring this segment to you.

And if you’re a music lover, be sure to check out Track by Track, the bi-weekly podcast from Paul Slavens, host of KERA radio’s 90.1 at Night.

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This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll remember an eclectic Texas musician who continues to defy categorization.

Doug Sahm was born Nov. 6, 1941, in San Antonio. He began performing on local radio at the age of 8. Although Sahm grew up listening to country, pop and rock and roll, he also was strongly influenced by R&B, jazz and conjunto. In 1964, Sahm formed the Sir Douglas Quintet. The group released several hit records, including “She’s About a Mover,” “Mendocino” and “Dynamite Woman.” The Sir Douglas Quintet was very much a rock and roll band, but it also incorporated other musical influences, such as conjunto, country, blues and R&B, to give it a distinctly Texas sound. Throughout the 1970s, Sahm continued forging a unique style that blended honky tonk, blues, conjunto, western swing, R&B and rock and roll. By the 1990s, Doug Sahm’s eclectic musical tastes helped form the foundation for his most successful group, the Grammy Award-winning Texas Tornados. Together with Augie Meyers, Flaco Jimenez and Freddy Fender, Sahm helped popularize the Tornados’ uniquely Texas sound throughout the world. Sahm died Nov. 18, 1999.

Next time on This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll look at a classic Texas dance hall that has become a world famous tourist destination.