If we build it, will they come? That’s the question Kitchen Dog Theater co-artistic director Tina Parker says keep her up at night as her company prepares to spend $2.5 million to create a new performance space.
Evidence says the answer is yes.
“If they don’t, we’re screwed,” Parker says in an interview at the 10,000-square-foot warehouse northwest of the Design District that Kitchen Dog bought for about $1 million in 2016 after raising the money in a capital campaign. “Because either we have our own space or we’ve got to close.”
North Texas theater groups that have a regular, reliable place to produce shows are better at drawing audiences than those that move from venue to venue.
Dallas-area companies with home venues include Dallas Theater Center, Theatre Three, Uptown Players, Undermain Theatre, Second Thought Theatre, Shakespeare Dallas, Cara Mia Theatre, Teatro Dallas, Echo Theatre, WaterTower Theatre and Ochre House Theater.
In Fort Worth, all four major groups, Stage West Theatre, Amphibian Stage, Circle Theatre and Jubilee Theater, have their own spaces.
Most groups rent, which can be expensive with space in North Texas at a premium. Some have long-term leases. Only a couple own their own spaces.
“There’s a kind of legitimacy that comes with having a space in Dallas,” says Tim Johnson, Kitchen Dog’s managing director. “If you don’t, you’re not a theater. You’re just some group who does shows on the side for fun. That’s the perception of the audience. It’s why people loved the MAC. Dallas loves a destination.”
Kitchen Dog called the McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Uptown home for 20 years until the building was sold in 2015. At its peak, the company had almost 400 season subscribers, Johnson says, and performed for thousands of patrons annually.
Founded by a group of Southern Methodist University graduates in 1990, Kitchen Dog has premiered dozens of new works, becoming a player in the national alternative theater movement.
But since leaving the MAC, it has been forced to produce its seasons at half a dozen venues, sometimes facing the nightmare of unexpectedly having to change locations in the middle of a show’s run. That happened more than once and involved moving sets and other technical workarounds.
It made it hard to draw audiences, Parker and Johnson say.
Once the troupe settled in at the Trinity River Arts Center for the 2017-18 season, it began rebuilding its audience, only to be interrupted by the pandemic. It returned there for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons, after which the venue was no longer available. Kitchen Dog is producing shows this season in unusual locations like the Frisco RoughRiders ballpark and a CrossFit gym.
With work on its Algiers Street warehouse scheduled to begin early next year, the hope is to open the facility in time for the 2024-25 season.
“I feel like we’re a very experienced moving company,” Parker says, “after all the moves, trying to rebuild and rebuild. You can’t do that year after year after year and expect your audience to stay with you, especially when there’s not a lot of media coverage. If you don’t get reviewed or there’s not an article, do people even know you’re there?”
Fort Worth’s Stage West went through its own struggles with space. Now it’s a shining example for other companies.
The group has been at its location in the Near Southside neighborhood since 2007 and bought the building on West Vickery Boulevard five years ago. In 2021, it added a second performance hall and upgraded its lobby and rehearsal room, then increased its staff by five this fall.
The company had rented there for 10 seasons starting in the early 1980s. Its subscriber base grew to almost 1,100. Since the end of the pandemic, Stage West has built that back up to about 800.
“It’s something that I do not take for granted,” says executive producer Dana Schultes. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t have some worry that the other shoe will drop, because things have been going so well since we moved back into the building.”
Schultes speaks from experience. Stage West, which has been housed at six locations since forming in 1979, was on the verge of shutting down in 2005. A donor came to the rescue with a $10,000 check. “That check was a lifeline to everything we have today,” she says. “We had to dig ourselves out of a hole.”
At the time, the company was temporarily performing at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center and had accumulated a $500,000 debt.
“We were just not getting the audiences anymore because we were homeless,” Schultes says. “Then finding this building again, having a place where we could say this is our space, that people can count on, creating what it feels like when you walk through the doors, that sense of event, is so important.”
Kitchen Dog’s Parker echoes Schultes in describing what it’s like to attend a show at Undermain Theatre in Deep Ellum. Dallas’ leading avant-garde company has performed in a quirky basement space it rents on Main Street for 40 seasons.
“I know where to go, I know how long it takes to get parking, I know places I like to eat,” Parker says. “There’s a routine and it gives me peace. I know I’m going to get a quality show that I can’t experience anywhere else. I think that’s what you give when you have a home.”
Cara Mia, Teatro Dallas and Soul Rep know what that’s like, too.
“Our growth does not happen if we don’t stay at the Latino Cultural Center and produce full seasons for 20 years,” says Cara Mia artistic director David Lozano.
Though they rented at the center for a long time, Cara Mia and Teatro Dallas became resident companies at the city-owned venue in 2021 and are still working out contractual arrangements with city officials for use of the building, according to Lozano.
Cara Mia and Teatro are considered two of the most important Hispanic theater companies in the country, but it took years of lobbying to gain their resident status at the center.
After returning in 2013 from a 10-year hiatus, Soul Rep became a resident company at the city-owned South Dallas Cultural Center, performing in the black box theater from 2015 to 2020. The group regularly drew an audience of 200 to 300 over the course of each production, according to co-founder and executive director Anyika McMillan-Herod.
“It allowed us to rebuild and reengage and reinsert ourselves into the local arts community and grow our patronage again,” she says. “We were doing workshops and putting on productions and master classes. It was great.”
But when hours changed under new management, it became difficult to rehearse and perform there, according to McMillan-Herod, and Soul Rep ultimately left.
McMillan-Herod says the company has begun a conversation with the city’s Office of Arts and Culture about possibly returning to the center in time for its 30th season next year.
Soul Rep pivoted to a new location after the pandemic, the Margo Jones Theatre in the Magnolia Lounge at Fair Park, which it rented for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons. During that time, Fair Park First, the nonprofit that oversees management of Fair Park, sent out a request for proposals to arts groups. Soul Rep applied to make the Margo Jones its home venue but never heard back.
Veletta Forsythe Lill, a board member of Fair Park First, says the thinking changed. Initially, the Margo Jones was to undergo a $900,000 renovation funded by bond money. Instead, a $6 million re-do is now planned, with an expected completion in early 2025. About half the money has been raised, Lill says.
In the coming months, Fair Park First plans to turn over management of the theater to Broadway Dallas, presenter of nationally touring shows at Fair Park’s Music Hall, according to Lill. “They know theater better than Fair Park First does,” she says. “That’s their bailiwick.”
Soul Rep has pivoted again, leaning into an itinerant season and calling on longstanding relationships with other troupes.
The company has already collaborated this season with Echo Theatre at the Bath House Cultural Center and premiered a new play by Dallas writer Erin Malone Turner in the basement space at Theatre Three.
Next up in January is McMillan-Herod's new play Elm Thicket at the Wyly Studio Theatre as part of the AT&T Performing Arts Center's Elevator Project. Then in February is the premiere of Yanga, a collaboration with longtime sister company Cara Mia at the Latino Cultural Center as part of their Café Negro Arts Series, which dates back to 1997. A blues musical follows in June at Undermain, where Soul Rep performed for one season in the 1990s.
McMillan-Herod sees these coproductions as another way to build support while the company is homeless.
“We made chicken salad as soon as we knew the Margo was going to be closed,” she says. “We know how to deal with adversity.”
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