Matthew Posey, the actor, director, and playwright who founded Ochre House Theater and was a founding father of Dallas' experimental theater scene, died at his home on October 2, 2026, the theater confirmed. He was 68.
In 2008, Posey opened Ochre House in Exposition Park near Fair Park. The 45-seat storefront venue became what the theater calls a legendary lab for raw, original art. Posey and his core company called themselves the "Pioneers of the Suavant-Garde," a name that promised surrealist, experimental performances delivered with a surprisingly sophisticated charm. The work was known for a deconstructed, musical-narrative style, built on live music, magic-realist imagery, and elaborate puppetry inspired by the Japanese Bunraku tradition.
Posey wrote, directed, and produced more than 40 plays there, including Morphing, Dr. Bobagonush, Moving Creatures, Mrs. Haggardly, Bill, Original Man, and Soft Noodle Map. Many began in his bound notebooks, which held more than a decade of original pieces. They examined love, family, class, addiction, violence, forgiveness, greed, and the search for one's place in the universe. He often staged them quickly enough that the theater reflected current social and political events as they unfolded (see: Moving Creatures, a politically charged satire about an evil and intolerable oligarch and his tyrannical rise to power). Ochre House also gave its core company of performers, designers, and musicians the chance to write and direct their own original work.
Posey also built a lasting bridge between Dallas and the flamenco world. For 15 years, he partnered with the Dallas-based Flame Foundation on original full-length plays featuring authentic flamenco. The collaboration brought international and local artists to stages in Dallas and New York.
Ochre House was not Posey's first venture in the city. After studying theater at Texas Tech University and interning at Houston's Alley Theater, he came to Deep Ellum and founded the Deep Ellum Theatre Garage. The venue hosted boundary-pushing work, including Sexual Mythology Part 1: The Underworld, a collaboration with another Dallas-based theater legend, Fred Curchack.
Posey later spent 12 years in Los Angeles, working in the film industry and ghostwriting, and he earned a master's degree in film from the American Film Institute. When he returned to Dallas, he joined the company at Undermain Theater before founding Ochre House.
In January 2017, Posey was shot in the face and thigh outside Cold Beer Company in Deep Ellum after leaving the bar with a friend. The attack came just days after previews began for his new musical Dr. Bobaganush, and that week's performances were canceled. But Dallas' arts community rallied around him with a benefit concert, and he returned to the Ochre House stage as the titular doctor that March.
Jerome Weeks, the former KERA and Dallas Morning News theater critic, recalled in an Oct. 3 Facebook post a story from that time. Weeks had reviewed Posey's first shows at the Deep Ellum Theatre Garage and ended up meeting his wife Sara, a member of Posey's first acting troupe, there. After the 2017 shooting, Weeks sent flowers to Posey's hospital room with an unsigned note: "This is what you get for introducing me to my wife." He knew Posey would appreciate the dark joke. Years later, Posey told him the flowers were the first public sign of what had happened, so when they reached the nurses' station, police grew suspicious of the sender. For a few hours that morning, Weeks was the chief suspect. The bullet had damaged Posey's teeth, cheek, and tongue, and, still groggy from anesthesia and painkillers, Posey could only gesture and mumble to the police that it was a joke — that the local theater critic had not tried to murder the artist. When Weeks learned of this long afterward, he was stunned and didn't know how to apologize. Posey, laughing, told him: "It was absolutely the only laugh I had that day."
Posey's career also reached well beyond Dallas. Over more than 35 years, he appeared in more than 60 major film and television productions, including Oliver Stone's JFK, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, and The Magnificent Seven. On television, he appeared in Lonesome Dove, Rectify, AMC's The Son, and HBO's Love & Death. His recent work includes the independent film El Tonto Por Christo and a role in the Austin-set, Matthew McConaughey/Woody Harrelson series Brothers.
Matthew Posey was born July 31, 1958, in Houston, the youngest of five children of Marvin R. Posey and Mary Louise Wrba Posey. His family says his gift for performance appeared early, with him staging "interviews" with vegetable at age four. By his sophomore year at Coronado High School in Lubbock, he had found a bigger audience as the emcee Click Dark in a class play based on American Graffiti.
He was remembered as a beloved partner, brother, uncle, friend, and artistic father figure.
"He was a unique and unforgettable person whose humor, creativity, stories, and larger-than-life personality made an impression on everyone who knew him," the theater said in its obituary.
Posey was preceded in death by his parents. He is survived by his life partner, Suzanne Thomas. He is also survived by his sisters Marlis Hodges and Candis Posey, his brothers William Marvin Posey and Richard Daniel Posey, and numerous nieces and nephews, countless friends, and his cats Chet and Etta.
"His family will remember Matthew not only for the life he lived, but for the memories he created and the love he shared," says the theater's obituary. "His presence will be deeply missed, but his stories, his work, his humor, and the memories he gave to those who loved him will remain."
A celebration of life is being planned, and details have not yet been announced. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to Ochre House Theater at OchreHouseTheater.org.
