The 2025-26 season for Dallas' Undermain Theatre is out, and it's bringing familiar names to Deep Ellum including Sam Shepard, Thornton Wilder, Gracie Gardner, Jane Wagner, and Jarrett King.
"World-altering events, climate change, floods, wars, approaching the age of thirty — life can be a deluge of disorder and upset," reads the press release. "Yet inside this world of uncertainty, perhaps we can find solace together, through the communal experience of theater. For its 42nd season, Undermain Theatre explores these relationships where we find commonality and companionship as the disasters that befall us slide into absurdity,"
The season begins with one of Sam Shepard’s most highly regarded early works, Action, where a quartet of friends seek solace in each other's company by sharing a house over the Christmas holidays after a catastrophic event has thrown the world into chaos. Directed by Undermain artistic associate Christina Cranshaw, it runs November 6-30, 2025.
Though Thornton Wilder is better known for his other Pulitzer Prize winning play Our Town, it was just four years later that he won another Pulitzer Prize for The Skin of Our Teeth.
This three-part allegory about the resilience of mankind centers on the Antrobus family of the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. It follows the family through an impending Ice Age, a world war, and a devastating flood, all of which they survive by the skin of their teeth. Directed by Stefan Novinski (professor and interim chair of Drama at the University of Dallas), it runs February 12-March 8, 2026.
As a season add-on, Undermain presents a reading of a developing work by Katherine Owens/Undermain Fund for New Work recipient Jarrett King. St. Miles follows a Black family coping with the loss of a young man to police violence. As the mother of Miles pushes for his canonization to sainthood, the family struggles with finding a way to come together in their grief. Directed by Jiles R. King II, the reading dates are March 20, 21, and 22, 2026.
Continuing with its commitment to the recipients of the Fund, Undermain will present a new comedy by this year’s recipient, Gracie Gardner. Undermain opened the last season with her funny but touching portrayal of high school competitive fencing, Athena. Saturn Return brings the same wit and emotional poignancy to the story of high-school friends reuniting for a friend's funeral as they approach their thirties. It's a comedy! Directed by artistic associate Christina Cranshaw, the world premiere runs April 30-May 24, 2026.
Closing Undermain’s 42 season is Jane Wagner’s award-winning one-woman comedy The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Originally written for her partner Lily Tomlin, this bold comedy explores the American experience through a parade of characters, their stories and foibles, and the universe in which they live. Undermain company member Marianne Galloway takes on the acting challenge and Ashley Puckett Gonzales directs, running June 11-28, 2026.
Undermain Theatre is located at 3200 Main St., between Murray and Trunk streets in Deep Ellum.
For tickets and season subscriptions, visit undermain.org.
