Legacy Optometrist Dr. Dean Dicks Stars in ‘The Birds’ at Theatre Suburbia

By Don Maines

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … yikes! Right the first time!

In The Birds, playing through June 30 at Theatre Suburbia, an unrelenting mass of vicious birds attack characters who include leading man Nat. He is played by Dean R. Dicks, an openly gay optometrist at the Legacy Community Health’s Montrose clinic.

“Dean is one of my favorite actors to work with,” says director Suzanne King. “I think he is one of Houston’s best actors, but he only does about one show a year because he’s busy as a doctor.”

Irish playwright Conor McPherson adapted his 2009 script of The Birds from Daphne Du Maurier’s 1952 short story of the same name, that also was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1963 film.

King also cast another openly gay actor, Jay Menchaca, “in a small but pivotal role” as a mysterious farmer who lives across the lake from the isolated house where Nat and two women seek refuge from the bird attacks.

“Jay is awesome in this,” says King.

Dicks previously starred at Theatre Suburbia in Richard Alfieri’s 2001 play Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks as a gay, sharp-tongued ex-chorus boy who is hired to teach ballroom dancing to a “tight-arsed old biddy” whose husband was a Southern Baptist minister.

Theater Suburbia is located at 4106 Way Out West Drive, Suite N in Houston. Performances continue at 8:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $16, $13 seniors/students. All tickets are $13 on Sundays tickets. Reservations: (713) 682-3525. www.theatersuburbia.org/reservations.php

Comments

comments