news-record.com

WINSTON-SALEM -- Like any professional stage actor, Amy DaLuz needs to perform in front of a live audience.

The Winston-Salem resident's hunger to perform is so intense that when she realized theater companies across the country were shrinking their seasons and sometimes closing their doors for good, she had to, well, act.

"On a selfish level, when I'm not working, I'm going crazy," says DaLuz, who played major roles in numerous productions at Triad Stage in Greensboro, including "Night of the Iguana," "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Little Foxes." "But on a selfless level, it scared me a lot that this is happening, and there are many great pieces out there that need to be heard and need to be seen, and we as theater artists have a responsibility to make sure those scenes can be performed."

What DaLuz decided to do was combine her efforts with six other theater professionals (Sarah Barnhardt, Miriam Davie, Sheila Duell, Star Lee, Miranda Lowder and Beth Ritson) to found the Paper Lantern Theatre Company. Dedicated to performing plays that are relevant more than risqué, the company's first play will be "Dead Man's Cell Phone" by award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl. The play centers on a woman who discovers the incessantly ringing cell phone of a dead man in a café and realizes it might be a key to connecting the pieces of this stranger's life.

"Ruhl is looking at technology and how that shapes our human interactions and our spiritual and emotional relationships to each other," DaLuz says. "For at least one of the characters in the play, as long as the man's cell phone keeps ringing, he's still alive."

The Paper Lantern will make its debut in Winston-Salem with "Dead Man's Cell Phone" on Friday at Theatre Alliance Stage.

Sharon Andrews, a theater professor at Wake Forest University, will direct. She admires Ruhl's work for the playwright's fantastical sense of stage directions included in her scripts.

"She has one stage direction that simply says, 'It snows paper,' and what it is is a credibly romantic moment," Andrews says. "Two people are falling in love, and they are both totally, sensually attracted to expensive paper and are touching the embossed paper together.

"Ruhl trusts theater people, she trusts the medium, and she puts things out there like that and allows other imaginations to realize that."

Perhaps the greatest irony of this production is that DaLuz produced the show so there would be more plays for her to act in, but she cannot act in this play because she's a producer.

"When I am playing a character, I get to go away for a while," DaLuz says. "So I knew if I was going to try and produce the show and be in it, that it wouldn't work."

Paper Lantern is currently operating without a permanent theatre space, a fact DaLuz finds liberating since it will give her company freedom to perform in Greensboro or High Point, too.

She's also considering several scripts for future productions but feels the most important task right now is to convince audiences to attend their first show.

"There's a chance that we might perform in front of an empty house," DaLuz says. "That's not OK, but I'm not going to be sorry that I did it, because I'll still get to watch this amazing cast with this amazing director do an amazing play."

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com.