In Memoriam

Katherine Owens, co-founder of Dallas' Undermain Theatre, has passed away

Undermain Theatre artistic director and co-founder Katherine Owens.

Photo by Stephen Webster

A light has gone out for the Dallas theater scene, as Undermain Theatre co-founder and artistic director Katherine Owens has passed away.

One of Dallas' most fearless and pioneering theater artists, Owens turned what many would consider an impossible space — a subterranean theater underneath Main Street, complete with low ceiling and giant, immovable concrete pillars — into a home for avant garde storytelling.

"She helped spark the alternative theater scene in Deep Ellum," says Kateri Cale, actor and artistic director of Echo Theatre. Cale was a member of the Undermain ensemble for 10 years, and worked closely with Owens and co-founder Raphael Parry (who now runs Shakespeare Dallas).

Over the past 35 years, Owens built a reputation that extended far beyond Dallas. She and husband Bruce DuBose — who would become the theater's executive producer and star in many of its shows — took several shows to New York, and Owens also directed in Macedonia and Yugoslavia.

In 2018, she directed the world premiere of Lonesome Blues, a play about legendary blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, that ran Off Broadway at the York Theatre. In all, she directed well over a hundred productions in her career.

New, and especially risky, work was a specialty. Owens maintained a relationship with playwright Len Jenkin that resulted in Undermain producing many of his world premieres, and in recent years, Undermain debuted a reading series devoted to new American plays called Whither Goest Thou America?. The last show Owens worked on was the final installment of Matthew Paul Olmos' so go the ghosts of méxico trilogy in April.

Of Owens and Undermain, Jenkin has said, "I love their work, and I think they are a great American theater. Kat Owens is a marvelous director. She runs on a powerful combination of great theatrical instinct and a wonderfully wide and deep knowledge of literature and human nature, and she loves and understands actors and directors, which is best of all."

In 2014, Undermain premiered Gordon Dahlquist's trippy sci-fi play Tomorrow Come Today, which went on to win a major international drama prize. Dahlquist returns this September with another world premiere, Red Chariot.

"Katherine Owens was one of the great visionaries in Texas theater history," says Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty. "Her work had international impact and will live on in Deep Ellum at Undermain Theatre, which so perfectly housed Kat's vision and artistry. She was also one of the most warm, open-hearted theater leaders I've ever known. All of us at Dallas Theater Center are heartbroken by her passing. She will be dearly missed."

Personally, it will be difficult to visit Undermain and not see Owens making her rounds before a show, shaking the hands of subscribers and new patrons alike, and welcoming everyone to whichever magical world she had constructed this time: a Chekhovian forest, a tropical beach, a New England family home, or a setting we couldn't even yet imagine.

Owens passed away on July 21, after battling lymphoma for the past five months. She was 61. She is survived by DuBose, her sister Kimberley Owens, and her brother Carl Owens. DuBose will continue their work at Undermain as producing artistic director, and lead Undermain in accordance with her artistic vision.

Throughout Undermain's 2019/2020 season, there will be a celebration of Owens' work in an exhibition of her watercolor paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as her notebooks in the Undermain lobby.

"She was and is the heart and soul of the Undermain Theatre and will be greatly missed," the theater says in a statement announcing her death. "We dedicate this and all of our seasons to her."

Owens' funeral will be held at Church of the Incarnation, 3966 McKinney Ave. in Dallas on Wednesday, August 7, at 11 am. Flowers can be sent to the Church of the Incarnation beginning August 6.

A statement from Undermain Theatre reinforces that "Undermain was Katherine's passion and life's work. If you would like to send a donation in her memory to the theater where her legacy will continue, please go to www.undermain.org. Bruce and the Undermain family are continually grateful for your ongoing love and support."

theater deaths

A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

dso luisi ring wagner recording concerts music symphony