Shadia Dahlal is in a hurry. The belly dancer and acclaimed playwright has a date in a few minutes.
“I’m going to have coffee with a hot young actor who wants to talk about theater,” she says breezily.
The California native, 74, sports a new hip, two new knees and a can-do attitude.
“Sometimes people my age are a drag,” she confides.
The performing arts community in Oklahoma includes about 116 theaters and likeminded organizations. They’re packed with bold, diverse, quirky folks, much like Dahlal – an actor, director, choreographer, producer, educator and writer. She moved to Tulsa in 1992, after a 14-year professional belly dancing career. She later joined Heller Theatre Company as a playwright-in-residence from 2019 to 2023, where she wrote plays and supported other creators. Heller produced three of Dahlal’s works, including her zombie apocalypse tale, Oklahoma Red.
“My inspiration, most of it, comes from what I see in the news,” says Dahlal. “And I love magical realism. I love horror.”
When it comes to finding your “process,” you don’t have to wear a purple Bob Ross mullet, gulp homemade hot sauce and sing in a heavy metal band to release your inner artist … but it works for prolific writer and filmmaker Eric Howerton, Ph.D. The Oklahoma State-University-Tulsa associate professor, who also directs the school’s Center for Poets and Writers, partnered up with Andrew Bateman to write the multi-award-winning dark comedy film, Go Down, Diller, about a father, a daughter and a talking bear.
Asked about his process, Howerton says he pictures his writing as a movie in his head while he goes along.
“But sometimes I have a weird image, you know, like nine bald mannequins buried up to their knees in the desert,” he says. “I don’t know. I have to find a way to get there,” Howerton adds with a laugh.
PJ Sosko says he was an odd choice to play Ernest Hemingway in the off-Broadway play The Jazz Age.
“I am six inches too small and [weigh] about 150 pounds less,” Sosko says. “But because that director saw me read Hemingway … ” he got the part.
The actor, writer and director worked in New York over three decades before the COVID-19 pandemic pushed him, his wife Marta and daughter Quinn to Tulsa. The move didn’t slow him down one bit; Sosko continued racking up acting credits ranging from Reservation Dogs to The Girls on the Bus. Sosko also produces Sittin’ With The Sosk podcast, and he hosts the free Sandbox monthly event in Tulsa’s Circle Cinema, where actors cold-read local writers’ works.
Like Howerton and Dahlal, he considers such collaboration critical.
“It is a collaborative sport. Because it’s tough to do it solitarily,” Sosko says. “What I believe in is getting out and doing a reading. Hear it out loud. You have to hear it outside of your head.”
Whether it’s on a big screen, small screen or stage, Sosko says the purpose is consistent.
“I think the writer’s goal is to highlight the human condition, right?” he says.
