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In spring 2022, Houston audiences had the opportunity to see two plays by Liz Duffy Adams within two months: Main Street Theater's revival of Dog Act (previously performed at MST in 2012), and the world premiere of Born with Teeth on the smaller of the Alley Theatre's two stages. Watching these plays back-to-back revealed Adams's interest in exploring the process of making theatre and its myriad uses of language. While Dog Act was set in a dystopian future and Born with Teeth in a recognizable past, they both nonetheless had much to say about our present moment through their invocations of climate change, violence, surveillance, and plague.
Dog Act focused on four characters who identified themselves as vaudevillians, traveling through a ravaged landscape and performing to survive. Rozetta Stone (Tamara Siler) had a nurturing and mutually supportive relationship with Dog (Jose E. Moreno), a young man who voluntarily underwent a species change. Dog mostly moved and spoke in human ways, but also sometimes barked and crawled on all fours to suggest his canine identity. Although Zetta evoked the steadfast Mother Courage, pulling her cart of belongings behind her, she was also a Prospero-like figure, wielding her magical "art," trapped in a forbidding place, and dreaming of an elsewhere that she identified as the luxurious and mystical land of China. Dog, like Ariel, was partly Zetta's child and partly her servant, and he proved in a spellbinding poetic soliloquy that his artistic gifts were equal to hers. Their equilibrium was upset by the arrival of Vera Similitude (Shondra Marie) and Jo-Jo the Bald-Faced Liar (Chaney Moore), fellow vaudevillians who convinced them to join forces, but whose relationship to each other was much more sinister. Adams revealed the power imbalances within these pairings, showing Vera's dominance over the younger Jo-Jo and eventually over Dog as well. All of the vaudevillians were threatened by the arrival of two scavengers, Coke (Trey Morgan Lewis) and Bud (Nathan Wilson), who used violence to rob and enslave them.
The world of Dog Act was dystopian, but it was unclear what had caused society to collapse. We gleaned certain pieces of information over the course of the play: illiteracy was widespread; weather patterns were extreme and the seasons were out of...