Season Announcement

Kitchen Dog Theater will pop up all over Dallas in nomadic 2023-24 season

SMU assistant professor Kara-Lynn Vaeni writes and directs Shape in 2024.

Courtesy photo

While it waits for its new Design District home to be completed, Kitchen Dog Theater is presenting its 2023-24 season all across town.

Three mainstage plays will have site-specific productions, punctuated by the annual PUP Fest nurturing high school talent from all over DFW.

Safe at Home by Gabriel Greene and Alex Levy is first, staged at Riders Field — home of the Frisco RoughRiders — and directed by Jack Reuler, founder and artistic director emeritus of Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis.

In less than two hours, star pitcher Victor Castillo is set to take the mound for game 7 of the World Series. But when a rumor begins to circulate that Castillo may use the sport’s biggest stage as a political protest, the shock waves hit all corners of the stadium, from the owner’s box to the locker room.

Instead of creating nine interiors in a traditional theater with a stationary audience, the existent spaces at Riders Field will become stages for a cast of actors who repeat their scenes over and over as the patrons, not the cast, move from scene to scene.

This regional premiere will be the second-ever professional production of Safe at Home. It runs December 7-10, 2023, for five performances only.

Next up is Shape, written and directed by Southern Methodist University assistant professor Kara-Lynn Vaeni.

The action-packed, feminist comedy offers a forthright look into fitness, body image, and how we define strength. For this production, the audience will be "getting back in the gym," both literally and figuratively, at D-Town CrossFit in the Design District.

Shape was first produced at Kitchen Theatre Company in Ithaca, New York, in 2021 and appeared on the prestigious Kilroy’s List. This regional premiere, also enjoying its second professional production, runs February 8-25, 2024.

Another immersive experience is promised for the third production, which is currently TBA.

For its 22nd annual event, PUP Fest will feature six staged readings of jury-selected plays written by DFW high school students, featuring student actors directed by area professional directors.

PUP Fest is the culminating event of Dallas Playwriting Arts Collective (D-PAC), a partnership with Dallas ISD and Junior Players.

Location is still TBA, but the date is set for June 8, 2024.

For more information, visit kitchendogtheater.org or call 214-953-1055.

theater

Mural News

Netflix House will debut in Dallas with murals from acclaimed artist

Netflix House

Jeremy Biggers at Netflix House

A long-awaited immersive venue is opening in Dallas, and it will debut with local art on its walls: Netflix House, a year-round exhibit revolving around Netflix shows and movies, will open at Galleria Dallas on December 11, with two murals from award-winning Dallas multi-medium artist Jeremy Biggers.

Netflix House is an immersive dive complete with merchandise store, film house, arcade, and restaurant-bar. When it opens, Dallas will be the second location in the U.S., following Philadelphia, where it debuted in November 2025, also with murals from a local artist.

A graduate of Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts, Biggers is a renowned artist whose murals can be found spashed on walls across Dallas. Many, such as the Selena portrait on the wall outside Top Ten Records at 306 S. Bishop Ave., have become local landmarks.

He's a logical choice, having worked with a number of corporations including Nike, Adidas, the Dallas Mavericks, and IBM, for whom he created the "THINK" mural in their Dallas corporate office. His works have also been exhibited nationally, including a 2024 solo exhibition "be safe out there bro" at Band of Vices, a gallery in Los Angeles.

"Being chosen to be the artist to paint this mural, it would have been a disservice to myself, as well as the art scene in the city, not to try to infuse myself into it," he says.

$\u200bJeremy Biggers at Netflix House$ Jeremy Biggers at Netflix HouseNetflix House

Biggers did two murals featuring his interpretation of Netflix figures including the Squid Game Young-hee doll, characters from KPop Demon Hunters and megahit series Stranger Things, plus Pandy and DJ Catnip, the best friends in the interactive series Gabby’s Dollhouse.

Both murals are intensely colored works that incorporate Biggers' signature motif: a grid of polka dots spread across the image.

One is on the exterior of Netflix House, at the parking entrance, a colorful collage of characters, measuring 38 feet x 50 feet — the tallest mural Biggers has tackled. He painted it with aerosol; it took him two months to complete.
The other is on the interior, on the mall side entrance of Netflix House, measuring 57 feet x 12 feet — a study in moody blacks and blues, with accents of neon-red that give it a 3D effect.

“I'm trying to tell the story of Netflix, and the story of where Netflix has been historically, where Netflix is headed in the future, and then also infusing my own narrative and my own language visually into that story,” he says.

“They could have opened this anywhere, so for Dallas to be one of the very first locations — that’s a testament to us as a market, as consumers of arts and consumers in general," he says.

Jeremy Biggers at Netflix HouseNetflix House

galleries openings