Retired educator, first-time playwright debuting original comedy ‘The Reunion’ in downtown Conroe

After performing in Conroe and the Houston area, retired educator Dixie Cooper will be stepping out with a play of her own creation.

Her show “The Reunion” will premier at 3 p.m. Sept. 29 and run again at 3 p.m. Sept. 30 at the Owen Theatre, 225 Metcalf, in downtown Conroe. 

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Conroe veteran actress Terry Woods’ Second Act Senior Theatre group which holds classes at Lone Star College-Montgomery is producing the show.

They are asking for donations instead of a ticket price. 

The play which Cooper, 72, calls a comedy revolves around a group of Class of 1957 graduates coming together for their 50th reunion. 

“(The character) Rosemary is taking charge for the first time. The theme is it’s never too late to make your dreams come true,” she said. “The music and dress of the play is back to the 50s including saddle shoes and poodle skirts.”

For Cooper and her fellow students from the Second Act Senior Theatre group, this is a project four years in the making. 

Cooper comes from a family involved in show business. Her father nearly went to school on a drama scholarship. Her brother, Ryan Hinson, is a professional actor in Canada and she has many cousins in some aspect of the entertainment business. 

At the close of her teaching career, the South Montgomery County resident went to a senior learning open house at Lone Star College-Montgomery and became interested in an acting class. 

“I wanted to try something I had never done before,” she said. “I never thought I’d fall in love with it. What really influenced me to try this class was a friend of mine from high school who lives near Austin in a retirement community. She was in a play that the community was putting on. She invited me to come see her and seeing her I thought ‘That looks like a lot of fun,’.” 

Woods, 73, is the leader of the senior acting class at the college. 

“Once the class was over, we didn’t want to stop meeting,” Cooper said of the students in her class. “We said we would miss this if we couldn’t go every week.” 

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The students in the class continued to meet independently and they’d bring monologues, scripts or skits to discuss. Additionally, Cooper went on to be in plays at the Crighton Theatre and Owen Theatre and at Playhouse 1960. She is currently in a play at Theatre Suburbia. 

As a part of the group’s discussions, one student suggested he’d like to play rock songs and sing on stage with his guitar. 

“I went home thinking at our age, we could never play young kids in high school,” she said. But they could play mature adults having their 50th high school reunion. 

She wrote the script in 2019 and during the pandemic members of the class did the play on Zoom. Some of the material is based on the reunions she has attended as a 1969 graduate of Westbury High School in Houston. 

“In a million years, I never thought anything would come of this other than in our little study group,” she said. Roughly a dozen actors are a part of the hour-long show. 

They showed it to Woods and she liked it and they chose her to direct the show. 

“I’m just so impressed that there has been this much tenacity to keep it going,” Woods said of the project from four years ago. 

Cooper’s hope is that this play will open the doors for more plays for seniors. 

“There are a whole bunch of us that still want to perform and we’re really still pretty good,” she said. “Just based on our little group alone, it convinces me that there’s a market for this and there’s a need.”