Prancing Puppies and Flying Pizza!

10 most unforgettable moments in Dallas theater 2013 range from absurd to incredible

Like every theater critic, I have already filed my year-end, best-of list. There was certainly some incredible theater in 2013, with productions, performances and designs that challenged and delighted audiences.

This list, while it may include some of those best-of’s, is meant instead to celebrate the memorable moments — good, weird and/or amazing — that stuck with me long after the curtain dropped.

Best Photo Op: XSR: Die!, Pegasus Theatre
It’s time for Rehearsal for Murder!, the 2014 installment of Pegasus Theatre’s yearly Living Black & White production. Do yourself a favor and get what might be the best profile picture ever, as I did following last year’s production.

After each performance, the actors from Kurt Kleinmann’s comic murder mystery plays pose for snaps in the Eisemann Center lobby. Go see their amazing black, white and gray makeup up close (yes, it’s even in their ears and on their gums!) and then try to convince your friends the picture wasn’t Photoshopped.

Best Lip Synching: The Lucky Chance, Echo Theatre
This play, from one of the earliest known female playwrights, boasts the kind of whirlwind romances and mistaken identities we often associate with Shakespeare. What we may not often associate with a play written in 1686 is Dusty Springfield.

Director Rene Moreno and choreographer Sara Romersberger sprinkled ’60s-era pop tunes into their groovy production, which was updated from 17th-century Restoration to swinging London, giving the actors — and the audience — a hilarious outlet from the flowery language and earnest declarations of love.

Best Office Romance: RX, Kitchen Dog Theater
Which one, you might ask? Kate Fodor’s sharply satiric take on our increasing chemical dependence centered around the deeply unfulfilled Meena, an editor of a cattle and swine magazine who enrolls in a Wonder Drug trial. The pills are meant to up her life satisfaction, but as a bonus she also ends up falling for the nebbishly cute doctor who’s monitoring her progress.

As adorable as it was to watch Tina Parker and Max Hartman timidly dance around their characters’ attraction, it was downright awesome to watch Parker (who won our hearts with one of the year's best performances) get it on with her magazine colleague (Christopher Curtis) in a blouse-ripping, shove-everything-off-the-desk moment of workday passion.

Best Opera Tie-In: Fly By Night, Dallas Theater Center
There was much to love about this new musical, currently prepping for its May premiere Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. The score felt fresh, the intricate plot boasted some truly satisfying connections and the performances were endearing (and, in the case of Asa Somer’s multifaceted narrator, probably exhausting).

But it was DFW favorite David Coffee who shone the brightest during this play about the 1965 New York City blackout, playing a lonely widower who remains connected to his late wife through a recording of La Traviata. There were precious few moments when Coffee’s character wasn’t steeped in a deep depression, yet his performance still managed to be touching, inspiring and nothing short of illuminating.

Best Excuse for a Thin Mint: Daffodil Girls, Inspired by David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Fun House Theatre and Film
I’m not the only one who heaped praise on this clever adaptation of Mamet’s famously ruthless tale of greed and underhandedness, told here by adorable little girls selling cookies. It totally deserves all the happy words we critics had to give it, and even picking a favorite moment is d*%! near impossible.

Was it when an overly confident Lizzy Green declares that she will be the top seller and win the pony party? Or was it when Lynley Glickler consistently cut down the impossibly cute Zoe Smithey (who definitely knows how to work a protruding bottom lip)? Or perhaps when Kennedy Waterman stoically phones her divorced parents, swallowing back tears and displaying emotions that most adult actors could never dream of eliciting? Impossible to choose, I tell you.

Best Puppy: So Help Me God!, Theatre Three
We’re all suckers for cute animals onstage, and Terry Dobson knows it. The director of So Help Me God! may not have ultimately been able to give this backstage farce much bite, but he did cast Skye, a rescued Chihuahua mix, in the oh-so-important role of diva Lily Darnley’s pampered pup, Frou-Frou.

Skye was also up for adoption through Take Me Home Pet Rescue. Her foster family offered meet-and-greets with her in the lobby after the show.

Best Reason to Ask for ID: Jailbait, Dallas Actors Lab
Deidre O’Connor’s intimate and provocative play toyed with its audience, presenting two high school girls (Mikaela Krantz and Katherine Bourne) who go out clubbing disguised as coeds. When Bourne’s character meets and connects with a much older man (who’s none the wiser to her true age), the assumption is that you as the audience should be repulsed.

Instead, Bourne and Kyle Lemieux delivered performances nuanced with nerves and vulnerability. When Lemieux’s character finally learned who was in his bed, the range of emotions — from loathing to fear to hurt — made the scenario much more than cut and dried.

Most Erotic Reading: Cock, Second Thought Theatre
Second Thought Theatre gave audiences a tantalizing preview of its upcoming full production of Mike Bartlett’s play with a staged reading during Uptown Players Pride Festival. Even with clunky scripts and binders in their hands, things got hot and heavy as Joey Folsom and Danielle Pickard, um, became intimate — all without ever touching each other. The power of words, y’all.

Best Use of Pizza: Matt & Ben, Echo Theatre
Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’ slight comedy about Hollywood’s favorite bromance worked because of actresses Catherine DuBord and Miller Pyke, who weren’t afraid to get physical in order to convey their dudeness. A balls-to-the-wall food fight — replete with Doritos, Coke bottles, real pizza and baked goods — showed just how committed these two were.

Best Joke: Clybourne Park, Dallas Theater Center
I’m not going to ruin it for you, but Tiffany Hobbs’ delivery of the crude yet laugh-out-loud funny joke in Act II of Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer Prize-winning sequel to A Raisin in the Sun stopped the show. Everyone who has seen the play wonders what you thought of “the joke,” and everyone who hasn’t should be sad they’re not in on it.

Echo Theatre made a 17th-century play groovy, baby.

Photo courtesy of Echo Theatre

Echo Theatre made a 17th-century play groovy, baby.

unspecified

In Memoriam

Matthew Posey, founder of Dallas' Ochre House Theater, dies at 68

Ochre House Theater presents Dr. Bobaganush

Photo by Robert Hart

undefined

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.

fair park theater obituary

Prancing Puppies and Flying Pizza!

10 most unforgettable moments in Dallas theater 2013 range from absurd to incredible

Echo Theatre made a 17th-century play groovy, baby.

Dallas' 10 Best Dressed celebrate in final downtown Neiman Marcus fete

Get Tex-Mex and bargain margs at Alexander's Cantina in North Dallas

Free Dallas job fair connects workers with over 3,000 'high-paying' jobs

In Memoriam

Matthew Posey, founder of Dallas' Ochre House Theater, dies at 68