A darkly whimsical two-hander imagining a fictional meeting between Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Addams opens for a limited three-performance run this weekend at Theatre Denton's black-box Annex space inside the Golden Triangle Mall. The extended one-act, titled When Hitchcock Met Addams, is set on a single Sunday in late 1963 and casts the Master of Suspense opposite the cartoonist who created The Addams Family, examining what the show describes as an unexamined friendship between the two men.
The premiere runs tomorrow through next Sunday, according to CultureMap Fort Worth. Written and directed by Bill Kirkley, the show is billed as a special presentation and doubles as a fundraiser for the theater. It unfolds with just two characters carrying the entire piece, paying tribute to the legacies of both men across a single extended scene.
A Real Friendship Behind the Fictional Meeting
The play's premise draws on documented history: Hitchcock and Addams were genuinely friends, and Hitchcock famously worked a nod to Addams' macabre cartoons into the auction scene of his 1959 film North by Northwest, according to Filmsite.org. Addams had also been formally recognized within mystery circles years before the play's setting, becoming the first non-novelist to receive a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1961 for his body of work in mystery and dark humor, per the Palace Theater.
Setting the play in late 1963 is no accident. That period coincided with the real-life development of Addams' previously unnamed single-panel cartoons into The Addams Family television series, which debuted on network television in September 1964, according to the New York Public Library. The timing places the fictional encounter at a pivotal moment in Addams' career, just as his morbid sensibility was about to reach a mass television audience.
Inside the Annex, Denton's Home for New Work
The Annex operates as a retrofitted former multi-screen cinema inside the Golden Triangle Mall near Dillard's, and it's dedicated to experimental plays, new scripts, and youth theater classes, according to Theatre Denton. It's a deliberately different footprint from the company's flagship Campus Theatre downtown at 214 W. Hickory St., which opened in 1949 as a movie palace for local university students, reopened in 1995 as a 300-seat performing arts center, and was designated a Texas Historic Landmark in 2009, per the Denton County Office of History and Culture.
Theatre Denton itself was formed in 2020 through the merger of two long-standing local arts organizations, Denton Community Theatre and Music Theatre of Denton, according to Wikipedia. That history helps explain why the company now runs two distinct venues simultaneously: a black-box space for new and experimental work, and a historic downtown stage for larger mainstage productions.
Kirkley's Fall Doubles Down on Addams
Playwright and director Bill Kirkley is a veteran of Denton theater who previously managed youth theater programs for Denton Community Theatre and appeared as Canon Chasuble in Theatre Denton's May 2026 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, according to Springbok Academy. His work this fall doesn't stop with the Annex premiere. Theatre Denton's season also includes The Addams Family Musical, running October 8 through 18 at the Campus Theatre, which Kirkley is co-directing, meaning he'll have helmed two Charles Addams-related productions back-to-back this autumn.
The pairing gives Denton audiences a full arc: an intimate, experimental two-character piece imagining Addams' private world in the Annex, followed weeks later by the full-scale musical version of his most famous creation on the historic Campus Theatre stage. It's part of a broader wave of investment in Denton's performing arts scene, which also includes a $9.1 million restoration of the historic Fine Arts Theatre downtown, backed by $1.6 million in Denton City Council tax increment reinvestment subsidies, as Hoodline previously reported.
