"I can't stand plays," pronounced the iconic American choreographer Mark Morris to a captive Menil crowd a few weeks back.

Well. Mr. Morris, I love plays, mostly because I'm still trying to understand them. After spending a few decades as a choreographer, I can find the operational center of a dance in a nanosecond. How a collection of words, mostly dialogue, transform into a cohesive work of art still holds great mystery to me (although I should disclose that 24 hours after Morris' sweeping remark, I announced (only to my husband), "I can't stand video art.")

I am also curious about how any play ends up on a Houston stage. So I decided to investigate how two powerful and smart plays, Don Wilson Glenn's American Menu and Caryl Churchill's A Number, landed on the season's repertoire curated by two powerful and smart women of Houston theater, Eileen J. Morris of The Ensemble Theatre and Rebecca Greene Udden of Main Street Theater.

Morris (the artistic director, not the choreographer) has been carrying around American Menu in her little notebook of potential plays since she first saw it at the National Black Theatre Festival in 2005. The play was directed by Ajene D. Washington, Morris' old college mentor. "That was fate and another sign that I had to direct this play," Morris recalls. "The feeling was immediate."

Morris worked alongside Ensemble's late founder, George W. Hawkins, from 1982 to his death in 1990. She assumed the role of artistic director from 1990 to 1999, when she left to work as managing director at Kuntu Repertory Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh. She went on to direct Glenn's play at New Horizon's Theater in Pittsburgh.

But the plot thickens. The very week Morris returned to helm of the Ensemble in 2006, she got a call out of the blue from Glenn.

"Is this Don Wilson Glenn, the playwright?" Morris gasped with disbelief. "Get out of here, we were just talking about your play."

It took another few years of carrying around American Menu in her notebook to find the right time and place in the season to bring the play to Houston. Finally, everything fell in place and she felt that Glenn's play would be the perfect way to celebrate Black History Month. Also, as women are a large part of Ensemble's subscriber base, the all-female cast appealed to Morris. "He writes from the female perspective so well," she says.

Glenn's play takes place in 1968 at a Livingston, Texas diner after Martin Luther King's assassination, and follows the lives of five kitchen workers caught up in the aftermath of the brutal murder of a black child. Rich with biting and often witty prose, Glenn is a master of taking us back in time and inside civil rights-era Texas through the vivid lives of these women.

"My mother actually worked at this diner for a time in her life," Glenn says. "She used to come home smelling of donuts and tell me about life in the kitchen."

Morris took advantage of the playwright's proximity in Livingston and the cast took a field trip to visit the very same diner that inspired the play. "It's so rare that you get to be in the place that was in the head of the playwright," says Glenn. "We got a historical tour and even had some lunch, although I don't think the cast was very impressed with the food."

For Morris, bringing American Menu to Houston is about coming full circle. From a dream in her notebook, the play is now on her stage and moving audiences to think and consider the world around them. "We don't live in post-racist world yet, the signs may be down, but there's still work to be done," says Glenn.

Udden is all about making audiences think, too. She is knee-deep in lining up the next season on a series of yellow sticky notes that move around until they reach a certain perfect balance. There is no particular deadline, and in some ways, curating is a 24/7 job for the pensive artistic director. "It's done when it's done," says Udden, who founded MST in 1975.

Churchill's A Number, opening later this month, has been on her wish list for a long time, but the ideal slot didn't make itself known until this season. The play examines the emotional repercussions of human cloning in light of the father/son relationship.

"About half of my season on average are plays by women, and I just love Churchill," she says. "It's a staggering play and raises so many issues and does so in a subtle way."

It's a one-act play, so it needed a counterpoint that made sense. It also needed to fit with the rest of the season. She selected Sophie Treadwell's 1928 Machinal and doesn't get too heady about the pairing. Udden smiles, "Two plays Becky likes."

MST's loyal subscribers rarely miss a play, so Udden considers the entire arc of the season for the viewer. "Houston has moods you know," she says. "We always open with an important play that just feels like an opener."

This year Caridad Svich's adaptation of Isabel Allende's The Houston of the Spirits set the season in motion. Udden can usually tell from reading a play if it's going to work, except for Terrence McNally's Master Class, which held the post-holiday slot.

"When I read the play, I thought, who would want to spend two hours with Maria Callas?" After she saw a production she had her answer — a whole lot of people, as the entire last weekend was sold out.

Udden still spends some time on stage herself, though she rarely thinks about that possibility when reading a script. "Except for last season's Third," she says. "I saw myself in the role of the professor immediately." This season she appeared as Boo Levy in Alfred Uhry's The Last Night of Ballyhoo.

"The director asked me and I said yes," Udden says.

She gets several scripts from aspiring playwrights each week. "The play has to strike me in the first few pages," she says. That happened with Lans Traverse's Driftwood, which will have its world premiere later this spring.

Both Udden and Morris curate with an eyes-open approach, sensitive to their loyal bases, but also bringing a collection of plays they personally cherish onto their home stages. They think of a season as a kind of journey with each play as a stop on the trip.

Tonight, the train stops at the Ensemble. No really, it does; Metro named a stop after the historic theater.