In the Saturday spotlight, we’re getting to know some local artists. During the annual Cedars Open Studios tour, you can tour the artist studios in this Dallas neighborhood. The event culminates with the Corinth Park Party, featuring live music, a group art exhibition and the "art as fashion/fashion as art extravaganza." Click here for the event's Web site. And if you plan on going, here's a map of participating studios.

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.

• Listen to the KERA radio report:

• Online version:

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

• KERA radio review:

• Expanded online review:

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.

Stephanie "Tefi" Hindall is a Dallas-based jewelry designer who runs her own design studio, Tefi Designs. Not only does Stephanie create some really unusual and creative jewelry and accessories, she is also the founder of EtsyDallas.com, a cooperative craft collective of artists and designers living and working in Dallas. These folks sell their merchandise on the Etsy Web site, as well as at local and regional craft fairs and events, one of which is taking place on Saturday at Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas. The 2nd Annual Jingle Bash will feature 50-plus Dallas Etsy artists exhibiting and selling fabulous creations, perfectly timed for the upcoming gift giving holiday season, or for your own personal pleasure.

In an e-mail exchange, we took a peek inside Stephanie's creative and inventive mind as a part of this week's Art&Seek Q&A:

Art&Seek: You are quite the crafty gal. When did you know that you had a knack for creating such wonderful jewelry and accessories?

Stephanie Hindall: It’s a pretty unremarkable story, really: Girl graduates with English degree and no job prospects, girl meets beads, girl starts making necklaces. It was a creative outlet for me at the time (1998) and just blossomed from there into a full-fledged business.

A&S: What sorts of materials inspire your designs?

S.H.: I use top quality beads and findings of all kinds: gemstones, Czech glass, pearls, sterling silver. I also make my own needle felted beads using 100 percent naturally-, ethically-raised wool. For my fabric items (brooches, hair clips) I use designer and vintage fabric.

A&S: I don't particularly like the term "craft." However, when I hear it phrased as "handmade," I want to break open my piggy-bank and shop 'til I drop. What is your take on the world of crafts now, versus, say, 20-years ago?

S.H.: Honestly, I didn’t think there was a world of crafts 20 years ago. That would have been 1989, when I was 14 and starting high school. Back then, “crafts” to me meant lanyards and plastic pony bead stretchy bracelets – you know, the things reserved for summer camp and vacation Bible school. The artists of Etsy Dallas, who I am proud to be associated with, are professional, talented artists who take the term “crafts” to a completely new level – one that is emulated by successful retailers like Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters and Fossil.

A&E: When you are creating something, do you have the story in your head as to how you’ll describe it? Or is it the other way around?

S.H.: For the most part I make a piece, photograph it, then name it right there on the spot as I add it to my online shop. I draw from my insanely useless knowledge of pop culture as well as all the schooling I got in the English department at UT Austin. You can’t go wrong referencing Heathers or quoting e.e. cummings. People in the art/craft world often take themselves way too seriously. I like to mix it up with a bit of humor and self-depracation from time to time. I’m not curing cancer or rocketing to the moon. I’m just a girl making pretty things that I hope people will like (and buy!).

A&S: You work full-time as a grant writer for a local non-profit serving homeless children, and you are an adviser for La Reunion, a member of the North Oak Cliff Conservation District, a board member of the Oak Cliff Artisans, a wife, a mother and the founder of Etsy Dallas. When do you find time to sleep, much less create these works of art?

S.H.: This word you use: “sleep.” Yeah, I’m not sure what that means.

A&S: Share with me some of the history of Etsy Dallas and what you hope to accomplish (or continue accomplishing). Also, what sorts of artisans can be found among the Etsy Dallas crew?

S.H.: I founded Etsy Dallas back in September 2007 as a response to the lack of inclusive craft groups in Dallas and the need for a leader to step forward and start a cohesive and active craft collective. So I rolled up my sleeves and took the lead. Today, Etsy Dallas is made up of a group of local artists and designers who have been juried into the group for both the quality of their work and their level of commitment to the team.

A&S: Of all the goodies you have for sale, which is your favorite and why?

S.H.: Boy, that’s like asking a mother to pick her favorite child. The newest pieces I am working on are my fabric brooches, which sold very well at this past weekend’s Cliff Fest. But my staple is my original design Peapod pendant necklace, which is a customer favorite.

A&S: I actually shot some video footage of your jewelry at Cliff Fest this past weekend and was really kicking myself for not acquiring some of the treasures I saw. So, I’m very excited to attend Jingle Bash this coming Saturday. Tell me about the event and what visitors can expect.

S.H.: This is the second year we’re putting on the Jingle Bash and have been planning it since April. It’s going to be amazing – a sort of collective community party that happens to have incredibly talented artists selling their handmade wares. Aside from a variety of locally crafted clothing, jewelry, body care, art and more, the Bash will also have two full bars, great home-cooked food, pool and shuffleboard, DJ tunes and live music. And if you’re one of the first 50 shoppers, count yourself lucky because you’ll be handed a free collectible canvas Goody Bag chock full of handmade items.

The Art&Seek Q&A is a weekly discussion with a person involved in the arts in North Texas. Check back next Thursday for another installment.

Heeeere's Auteurism! Chris Hury plays a desperate filmmaker and Martha Harms is his would-be starlet

• David Novinski's review for Renegade Bus
  

• Review by Mark Lowry for Theater Jones

• Review by Lawson Taitte for Dallas Morning News

• Review by Alexandra Bonifield for Critical Rant & Rave

In Allison Moore's stage thriller, Slasher, when we first meet a low-budget moviemaker named Marc Hunter, he's in a Hooters-style joint in Round Rock. He's trading film-school insights about horror films with Jody, a worshipful movie geek who wants to be his assistant (Drew Wall).

What is truly scary, Hunter tells Jody, about director Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is not Leatherface, the masked, mass-murdering maniac who inspired a hundred Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees knockoffs. No, it's the family — the carnival of freaks who inhabit the old farmhouse with Leatherface. Chainsaw is a takedown of the locked-together, backwoods, American nuclear family and its inherent horrors.

Many theatergoers may think Hunter is blowing cineaste hot air here, trying to inflate a classic bit of gory, grade-Z movie fun with a lot of trendy academic pretension. But Hunter is actually offering a long-established analysis of Chainsaw — and one that neatly sets up the  family conflicts that will come soon enough in Slasher. Playwright Allison Moore clearly knows her stuff, particularly the details and mythology surrounding Hooper and Chainsaw. Round Rock, for instance, is just a smidgen north of where Hooper shot his film — in an empty farmhouse off I-35 in Pflugerville (set-decorated by the late Robert Burns, whom I knew in Austin).

But here's the problem: Marc Hunter actually is being mocked in Slasher. As ably played by Chris Hury in the Kitchen Dog Theater production, he's another Hollywood creep, a smarmy, lecherous moviemaker, desperate to save his dying career by helming his own splatterific entry, Bloodbath. Indeed, some of the better comic moments onstage in Slasher come when  Hunter's sorry, self-loving self gets zinged.

Hunter's remarks on Chainsaw — and how we're meant to view them — begs the larger question: What does Moore herself think of Chainsaw — and of the horror genre in general? You can't tell from Slasher. The play is clever, and a smart take on the topic ("The Horror Film Nexus: Excitement or Exploitation?") would be more than welcome. But for all of its attempts to delight in the happy carnage of the horror film — while also spoofing it and critiquing it seriously — Slasher is a muddle, a bloodbath of unresolved contradictions.

One way to understand the play is as a battle between second- and third-wave feminism, a tug-of-war over women's roles and self-determination in pop culture.  At the Hooter-ish joint, Marc hits on a young waitress, Sheena (Martha Harms), and convinces her that she'd be perfect for his film as the "last girl," the one who conventionally survives the maniac's onslaught. For her part, Sheena sees Bloodbath as her ticket out of her deadend job and out of her constricting family situation. She's supporting both a younger sister (Rebekah Kennedy) and their wheelchair-bound, painkiller-addicted mom. (Where the cannibal family in Chainsaw is all-male, the one in Slasher is all-female.)

For her part, though, Mom hates everything about Bloodbath. And she will do anything, including murder, to stop it.

Correct! That Hand Is Holding a Beer. Now Guess  What's in My Other Hand.  Harms, Wall, Kennedy, Hury and Leah Spillman, l to r, with Hassler avec machete

That's because Mom views the contemporary horror film with horror. Sheena sees slasher films as cheap thrills and sees herself as a bright, resourceful, free agent, choosing to scream and show some skin in order to get ahead (Harms is perfectly believable in this). But for her mother, Saw and Hostel and their gore-porn ilk are pure, patriarchal rape-by-entertainment; they're debasing exercises in sadism and sexism. Mom — played with unrelenting ferocity by Lisa Hassler — merges two types: the terrifying, repressive mother-figure from horror movies (see Carrie, Friday the 13th and even Psycho) and the cliched, old-school feminist, the humorless, sexless hag from, oh, a thousand cartoons, TV sitcoms and conservative talk-show portrayals.

All right, so Mom is an over-the-top caricature. Slasher is an over-the-top play –  staged with riproaring enthusiasm by Kitchen Dog director Tina Parker and her designers (Clare Floyd DeVries, Suzanna Lavender and Christina Vela). But unlike the caricature of Hunter, the director-lecher, the caricature of Mom is not particularly amusing. To add to her unpleasantness, Mom sees herself as a repeated victim (hence, the wheelchair). Wonderful. She's a raging whiner.

Nevertheless — like Hunter — some of what Mom says about Hollywood is quite true: the way the CSI and Law & Order franchises, for example, always seem to have a sexy prostitute-topless dancer-supermodel for a murder victim.

So how are we to take her analysis of the horror film? Shrill Puritanism or rigorous attack on masculine rage and profiteering? Interestingly, at one point, Mom turns to her traditional political enemy — anti-abortion Christian radicals — for help in shutting down the Bloodbath movie set. In other words, when playwright Moore needs to, she can ingeniously mix together unexpected ideological slants. But beyond ramping up the narrative tension with a violent, on-camera showdown of her trio — mother, daughter and director — Moore never really settles anything in their argument. She opts instead for the kind of wink-wink, contrived plot twists on which horror films often rely for their cliffhangers and denouements.

In all of this, of course, I sound very much like Hunter in that first scene, intellectualizing an experience that should be bypassing my brain and jolting me with laughs and frights. Yet this underscores what may be Slasher's greatest weakness: It's not that funny. Or rather, it's not funny enough, not clever enough for me to set aside  how these conflicting takes on the genre don't resolve. It's telling that some of the better laughs come when Jody must step in to play Bloodbath's own Leatherface, wearing a ghoulish mask, flashing a knife, threatening the torn and trapped Sheena — all the while exclaiming,  "Oh, I, ah, gee, I'm — sorry."

It's telling because Jody is deflationary. His little, nebbishy yelps are a surprise. He seems to have stumbled on this  movie set from some other, funnier play.

Alec Jhangiani has one of the more enviable jobs in the North Texas arts scene. As Artistic Director of the Lone Star Film Festival – which runs through Sunday – he’s charged with watching the films that get submitted and picking the best ones to show. He discusses the process of programming the festival and its role in promoting film culture in his home town as part of this week’s Art&Seek Q&A:

Art&Seek: How many films do you think you watched in deciding on programming for the festival?

Alec Jhangiani: Let’s see. I started watching two or three features a day back in mid-August. And we locked everything by about mid-October. So what would that be … definitely between 100-200 films that I watched from start to finish, and then another big bunch that I laid eyes on. We had a big screening committee that would vet the film before it got to us.

A&S: This will be the third Lone Star International Film Festival. What do you think you’ve learned from the first two?

A.J.: No. 1 is how far out the films need to be in place and just how much marketing needs to be done to get people to see these films. You can program really great films, but if they don’t have certain elements in them – like big name actors, or stuff like that – people aren’t necessarily going to go see them unless you can communicate to everybody why these films are playing. That process can take a while.

A&S: How would you describe your approach to programming the festival?

A.J.: For a smaller, newer festival, some of that is taken care of. We’re definitely limited by the films we have access to. We don’t have the access to every premiere that’s going to be out there like a Sundance does. … For the narrative features, we try and limit it to first and second time directors. In the past couple of years we’ve been able to do that. The thread that really presented itself, which I was very pleased about, for the narrative features is that they all focused in some way on relationships – on modern day relationships between men and women. They all had very different perspectives on that. … One thing we’re looking for across the board are films that are taking a genre or a direction or a certain issue and probing deeper into it, rather than a broad approach. We’re not necessarily looking for films with huge scopes. I think that’s one of the things that differentiates Hollywood from independent film.

A&S: A lot of festivals generate some buzz by offering a sneak peek at buzzy films that will eventually come to town. Lone Star seems to be focused on making sure that we see some smaller features that may not make it to a national release.

A.J.: To us, it’s kind of the natural role of a festival. I certainly understand why festivals [show sneak peeks of big films], but a lot of the times, it’s really sort of playing off the novelty of, “Oh, I got to see that film before everyone else did.” But in the end, it may not necessarily do much for the film. When you go back to look at the history of Sundance, that premise of showing films that people might not get to see is what the whole festival was based on. In developing [Lone Star] and coming up with a reason for doing a festival, that came up. There’s always going to be room there as other festivals grow and focus on higher-level stuff and stuff that’s going to get more attention anyway, like a Sundance – those festivals still remain very important, but they are showcasing a different part of the industry. There’s always going to be room for festivals like ours that are a little smaller that showcase films that people aren’t going to get to see otherwise.

A&S: Last year you showed a selection of Russian films. This year you are showing a trio of German films. Do you think you will continue to pick a country to spotlight like that going forward?

A.J.: Yes, that’s definitely the plan for now. … Last year we had some relationships through a board member with Russian film organizations, and at that point it kind of crystallized, and we thought we should have an international focus every year. Germany was one that I had been hearing about a lot and seemed like a natural choice. We discussed it with a couple of organizations around town that just kind of confirmed that inclination. So yeah, we hope to continue that. I think it’s something important that the festival can do.

A&S: Do you have a film that you are particularly excited about that you want to make sure people know about?

A.J.: Modern Love is Automatic is a really great performance. Easier with Practice is a very interesting, but in a way unrealistic, take on the modern day relationship, where Modern Love is Automatic will resonate with people a little more and does a really good job of investigating the apathy that a lot of people have toward relationships today. That’s one that people may not be inclined to see just by looking at stuff and reading the papers.

A&S: What’s the Lone Star Film Society’s role, and by extension, the festival’s role, in nurturing film culture in Fort Worth?

A.J.: I think if the film society continues to be the clearing house if possible to get people’s attention and to get people excited and then redirect their attention to wherever important films are playing in Fort Worth, what we’ve seen is that people respond. Once they get there and see the films, whether or not they were film people before, it really does open their eyes to this whole universe of films and film culture that is out there. At this point, we’ve proven a hypothesis in a way: Fort Worth audiences are sophisticated enough. They are curious and interested in new things and new art. The content hasn’t been here, but also all the work into getting them to show up hasn’t been here either, and that’s really where I think the film society can help out a lot.

The Art&Seek Q&A is a weekly discussion with a person involved in the arts in North Texas. Check back next Thursday for another installment.

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

• KERA radio review:

• Extended online review:

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.

In the Art&Seek Saturday Spotlight, we’re skating for a cause. The Art of Skateboarding gathers 200 skateboards designed and decorated by local artists, celebrities and art students. The event begins at 7 at Southside on Lamar in Dallas. If you attend, you can bid on the boards, with the proceeds benefiting Texas Scottish Rite Hospital.

Click here to ready Cindy Chaffin's recent post on the event.