In December 1959, the Kalita Humphreys Theater, the striking concrete home of Dallas Theater Center (DTC), welcomed its first audience. But its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, never saw a performance there. America’s most famous modern architect died just eight months before the opening of the theatre he called “one of the things I simply have to do before they put me in a box.” Still, the theatre’s curving walls, cantilevered levels, and distinctive stage unmistakably bore his mark.
It was not Wright’s work alone. The Kalita was also shaped by the collaborative input of a forward-thinking director named Paul Baker. Baker grew up in Waxahachie, Texas, earned a master’s degree in drama at Yale, and served as a theatrical specialist during WWII, organizing the entertainment branch of the European theatre of operation. Brought on as DTC’s founding artistic director, Baker, then chair of the Baylor University drama department, was among the first to suggest Wright as architect.
But as the two fought over expanding backstage space and adding a freight elevator, Baker learned the hard way that “the real Frank Lloyd Wright was a little different than the Frank Lloyd Wright in his books and his writings,” as Baker’s daughter, Robyn Flatt, a DTC company member for more than two decades, recalled in an interview.
In fact, the Kalita was the byproduct of a troubled partnership between this Texan director, influenced by the wide open spaces of his youth, and Frank Lloyd Wright, the pioneering designer behind organic architecture. In the years since its construction, the building’s legacy has been hotly contested: Dallas Theater Center’s own promotional publications have called it both “a great work of art” and a “cement bunker surrounded by trees,” both a “success as a practical, functioning place for theatre work” and “the worst theatre ever built.”
At the heart of these radically different descriptions is a building that has struggled since it was built to “be all things to all people,” as Ann Abernathy, architect and author of the theatre’s designation report, put it. It housed the Dallas Theater Center’s mainstage season for 50 years, functioned as a graduate theatre school for 33 years, and continues to host community events and theatrical productions by DTC and other companies.
The theatre—owned since 1973 by the city of Dallas, and leased back to DTC for $1 a year—is currently in sorry shape. Thanks to deferred maintenance, the white exterior is streaked with black dirt and the Wright-designed fountains out front are covered in rust. In fall 2023, Texas Monthly reported that the lobby bar is missing chunks, the primary bathrooms haven’t been updated since the ’80s, stage equipment is outdated, the rehearsal room floor is “worn with deep gouges, and several air vents have dark splotches that look like mold.”
In May 2024, a bond designated $8.9 million for repairs to the Kalita Humphreys Theater, but it will cover only the bare minimum to keep the space functional—i.e., repairing or replacing the HVAC system, replacing fire alarms, public safety and security upgrades, ADA accessibility, and backstage enhancements. Since efforts to coalesce around a master plan for the site foundered for the second time in 15 years last spring, the time is ripe for a conversation about what this theatre was designed to do—and what its successes and failures can tell us about the future of performance space design.
The Wright Way
When Wright agreed to design the Kalita, it was on the condition that he would use an update of the New Theater plans he’d first created in 1931 and adapted over the years for yet-unrealized projects in the Northeast. Wright had been at work on his New Theater concept since 1915, a culmination of ideas he felt would redeem “the rubbish heap that is the ordinary theatre” by constructing an intimate relationship between the audience and performers, prioritizing acoustics, and introducing innovations to unify the various spaces within the theatre building. His plans would also improve audience seating and make plays cheaper to produce in the bargain.
Wright’s New Theater concept, explained Joseph Siry, PhD, a professor of modern architectural history, was conceived to serve “theatrical management content with far more modest profits, producing year-round with a resident company of actors, and aiming to please a permanent local audience with a high standard in their material and production.” Fortunately, Baker’s original vision for the DTC fit this model.
What both Baker and Wright wanted above all was “an experimental avant-garde theatre,” said Abernathy. In particular, the two men connected around a desire to “break the box,” as Wright put it, and design a theatre without a proscenium. Wright railed against the “present peep-show character” of “the so-called legitimate stage.” He felt that proscenium theatres made shows “more like a painting…audience in one room, performers in another.” In his vision for the New Theater, audience and performers would be “under one ceiling—almost in one room—more like sculpture.”
At Baylor, Baker had already “broken the box” his way. He designed Studio One in a converted warehouse with two side stages and a larger central stage. Audiences in swivel chairs turned seats to face the action. In Baker’s words, it was “probably one of the best theatre spaces in America, or in the world, for experimental theatre.” The works he produced in Studio One included an Othello inspired by Cubist art he’d seen on a trip to Paris; three actors played each part, representing a different part of their character’s psyche.
While Baker’s experiments were inspired by modern painting, Wright saw the contemporary stage as under threat of being “done to death by the movies and television,” and in need of saving. His revolving turntable would allow for quick scene changes, as fast as film’s jump cuts. This turntable, and the music balconies Wright included in the design, also reflected the influence of Japanese architecture and Kabuki theatre.
Wright’s buildings, innovative in both design and form, were also a medium through which he tried to teach people how to live. Many of the homes he designed feature galley kitchens and cramped bedrooms off narrow, low-ceilinged halls, pushing inhabitants to spend their time connecting in light-filled living rooms. Indeed, in 1950, when he built a spiral-shaped home for his son David, Wright was so straightforward about the didactic nature of his designs, he even titled the plans “How to Live in the Southwest.”
When Wright set out to design the Kalita, another spiral-shaped building, he also brought ideas about how a theatre should be used to the project. This somewhat inflexible attitude meant, though, that integrating changes was a challenge. “You don’t work with Frank Lloyd Wright,” Baker said in an oral history now housed at Baylor University. “He tells you what you are going to get.”
Wright’s stylized windows on the back wall of the house, for instance, had to be covered with plywood to control the interior lighting during a show, and the hidden alcoves for lighting instruments he designed for the ceiling ultimately proved ill-adapted to lighting a show in more than one way.
For his part, Wright saw these difficulties as features rather than bugs. “The simpler the stage is kept,” Wright is reported to have said, “the greater will be the things done upon it. The classic Greek stages were without equipment for lighting and scenery.” To Wright, a theatre was a “temple,” with a focus on dramatic action, not commercial spectacle. Accordingly, he minimized the backstage space and put the scene shop in the basement. He designed ramps that led from the scene shop to the stage, which he felt served the dual purposes of restricting scenery and unifying form and function in the building.
In a 2014 journal article penned by Siry, Baker recalled Wright saying that he didn’t want his “temple filled up with old dirty scenery stage left and right. He felt that if we had ramps going down and very little offstage area that we would keep the temple clean and beautiful and there would be no place to put scenery and junk of that kind.” But Baker wasn’t on board with this part of Wright’s vision. As Flatt told me:
You couldn’t get a platform over a certain size to make the curve, so Dad told [Wright], “Look, we have to have a better way to get scenery up to the stage,” and Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t want to hear about that…He said, “Nobody has ever told me one of my buildings wouldn’t work.” And so that created a huge division…My dad had gone out to Taliesin [West] to meet with him, to go over the plans and say, “Here, we need this and that, we need this change here, this change, this change, and this change.” Frank Lloyd Wright was furious and said, “You have to leave right now.”… And they thought, “The whole deal’s gonna fall apart.”
Fortunately, Kelly Oliver, an architect on Wright’s team, was able to quietly introduce some compromises. The Kalita was built with one elevator and one ramp—and Wright never learned of these changes.
Thrown for a Curve
When the Kalita opened, the effects of these design choices became more apparent, both for good and ill. In some ways, Wright’s genius made the space a uniquely functional gem. Baker noted, “The furthest seat was only 55 feet from the stage. It’s very intimate, wonderful—the acoustics are excellent.”
Still, Flatt said that Wright’s design “was in a way very limiting…He already gave the shape, and if you could work within that, the production would be magical, and look and be wonderful. If you happened to try something else, you had a lot of barriers, and you were fighting the space…We created a lot of incredible productions there, but it was work.”
Baker and the DTC performers also found a workaround for the space’s limitations, carving an ad-hoc performance space out of the basement, with a somewhat triangular proscenium stage squeezed between two columns. Known as the Down Center Stage, it “had an oddball shape, as it went back following the lines of the building, because we were up against the back wall,” said Flatt. “It was a small space, but it was intimate and it was fun. We did some very experimental stuff…That’s where Preston Jones’s Texas Trilogy was born.” The experimentation paid off: Jones’s Trilogy went to Broadway, and he was featured on the cover of the October 1976 issue of Smithsonian magazine.
That the Kalita’s basement could spare space for the Down Center Stage was a matter of pure luck. As Abernathy put it, DTC “ran out of space the day they moved in.” Added Flatt, “The graduate school at one point had 80 students in it. We used every inch of that building. The little library on the side of the auditorium had to become a classroom and a rehearsal space; we rehearsed in the lobby; we rehearsed down in the scene shop, in the restroom lobby.”
As full as it was, the building provided a unique and memorable home for theatre students.
“I can remember being in those curved hallways running scenes with classmates,” said Jeff Storer, a 1982 graduate of the Trinity University Dallas Theater Center MFA program. The image he recalls, he said, is of “a beehive, in the way that you feel that sort of buzz of a colony of bees working together in the same structure—and even the shape of the beehive. No matter what floor you were on, you were in curved hallways. The stage was echoing that round sense of the building as well.”
Several small additions were made between 1965 and 1968 to add workspace, and the terrace Wright had designed for guests to enjoy during intermission was enclosed to create more rehearsal space. Between 1983 and 1989, after Baker left and during Adrian Hall’s term as artistic director, several more changes came: The rake of the audience seating was changed, altering the acoustics, and the seats Wright had designed to make it easier for audience members to walk past each other were replaced. The taupe interior was repainted dark green, and new stage lights were hung on pipes suspended from Wright’s ceiling coves. Wright’s stairs were adjusted to have wider treads and standard perpendicular angles. A parking lot was added, leveling areas of sloped terrain. To further address the problem of limited space, some rooms were partitioned, others expanded, and a two-story rectangular “auxiliary building,” called the Heldt Administration Building, was added to the Kalita’s grounds.
Former theatre critic Jeremy Gerard accompanied Hall on his first tour of the space. “Adrian is realizing for the first time that this may be the worst theatre ever built,” Gerard recalled for a 50th anniversary retrospective published by DTC in 2018. “There’s no fly space, no trap space. He is looking around, saying, ‘But where will my angels come from? Where will my devils come from?’” The theatre’s limitations seemed to be working just as the spectacle-adverse Wright had intended. As Hall himself reflected, “It was not a practical space. Frank Lloyd Wright had the very imaginative idea of bringing in the scenery through a tunnel that wound up into this round theatre. It seemed like a good idea, but it really wasn’t.”
In addition to making adjustments to the Kalita, Hall responded to the space’s challenges by building a provisional offsite venue for the company. Called the Arts District Theater, this was a metal warehouse located where the Winspear Opera House now stands. Remembered as “the most flexible theatre in America,” it freed DTC from “the need to avoid harming expensive interior finishes,” but ultimately proved a temporary structure.
Second Thoughts
The late ’90s and early 2000s saw some restoration efforts at the Kalita, but in 2009, DTC unveiled a new permanent home for their mainstage season, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre at the AT&T Performing Arts Center, a flexible modern space in the arts district. While this new home meant that DTC would no longer operate solely out of the Kalita on a permanent basis, the company didn’t abandon the building altogether. The company continues to lease it from the city for $1 per year, under an agreement active until June 2025, and the Kalita still hosts part of the DTC season (most recently, Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors and Shane).
Other groups in need of an auditorium have rented the space from DTC since the company began working primarily out of the Wyly, including LGBTQ-focused theatre company Uptown Players, an anchor tenant of the Kalita since 2010. After performing in a small 120-seat space for their first eight seasons, moving to the Kalita allowed Uptown Players to welcome larger audiences. The company has since adapted to the space. “We have learned how to take advantage of the intimacy of the venue,” said Jeff Rane, the company’s executive producer. “Our sets and our staging take advantage of the height and the openness of the performance space.”
Another anchor tenant, experimental theatre company Second Thought Theatre, rents the Heldt Annex Building on the Kalita’s grounds, but not for the offices it originally housed. The founders of Second Thought have converted the empty building into a black box called Bryant Hall, just as during Baker’s tenure the Down Center Stage was created to host experimental drama that the Kalita’s unique design couldn’t accommodate. Somewhat ironically, though the Kalita was intended to be a home for avant-garde performance, and its mainstage is still an active venue, the place to find avant-garde offerings on the Kalita’s grounds is in a converted space far simpler than those either Baker or Wright envisioned for the purpose.
Indeed, though Frank Lloyd Wright’s theatre was designed to prioritize intimacy and affordability, the Bryant Hall black box is proof that actors don’t need a space as designed as Wright’s to have an affordable, intimate place to perform. The simplicity of the black box achieves one of Wright’s main goals: to get rid of the proscenium and put actors and audiences in the same room.
Attention Must Be Paid
Still, the Kalita is something a converted office can never be: a landmark performance venue designed to impart a vision of what theatre can and should be. What will the Kalita be after another 65 years have passed? Is it destined to be an orphan, stranded between the visionary plans of its designer and the needs of theatremakers? Will it outlast the city of Dallas itself, as Wright predicted, or be destroyed by neglect?
The Kalita’s decline has been exacerbated by 15 years of inaction. In 2010, a city-commissioned plan to restore the building was never formally adopted amid the economic pressures of the recession. In 2019, the city asked DTC for a new master plan—then balked at the price tag of the 2022 proposal, created by celebrated architecture firm Diller Scofi dio + Renfro, which would open the site to the adjacent Katy Trail (a running and cycling path through Dallas), restore many 1959 architectural details, provide new rehearsal and performance spaces to replace the additions to the Kalita over the decades, and address accessibility and parking concerns.
Though progress appears to have stalled again, DTC executive director and CEO Kevin Moriarty sounded bullish on future prospects, saying that the company is “partnering with the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture to bring together a wide variety of community stakeholders and international experts to envision a restoration of the building.” He predicted that the city would likely take a few years to adopt a plan; in the meantime, fundraising from public and private sources will continue, with “likely 80 percent or more of the funding” coming from donors.
If the Kalita’s potential currently remains hidden behind its dilapidated present state, to those who remember, its value is worth fighting for. “It’s my favorite theatre in the world,” said Trey Birkhead, who grew up watching his aunt, Mary Sue Jones, perform and direct at the Kalita, and participated in DTC’s children and teen’s program himself.
While there are no easy answers to the question of the building’s future, performance spaces yet to be designed can still learn from the space and its history. One lesson: Beauty fades if a space isn’t continually invested in. Dedication to specific elements—whether negotiable, like scenery ramps, or essential, like quality acoustics—doesn’t guarantee that a space will be workable. Design and flexibility are a balance, and as theatre architecture moves forward, climate-friendly design will be part of the equation too.
Collaboration between architects and theatremakers needs to be a two-way street. The Kalita is a difficult space because of the extent to which Wright ignored Baker’s requests for changes. But it’s also a space that, for those willing to work with it, elevates a particular production approach. Listening to theatremakers about their immediate needs can make for functional spaces. For all its quirks, the Kalita also shows that attention to architectural detail can turn a building into a home for great theatre.
It may have more to teach us about adaptation. As Kevin Moriarty put it, “In the mid-1950s, when Dallas Theater Center was formed and Frank Lloyd Wright was hired, few could imagine the creative richness of the American regional theatre movement that would take root and flourish in the coming decades.” Today, he added, the American theatre is “at the edge of a similar moment of opportunity and transformation nationwide, as we seek to serve our communities in new ways that are responsive to the nation’s current needs, hopes, and aspirations.” Viewing the theatre’s history of trial and error as an inspiration rather than a liability, he concluded, “The Kalita serves as an embodiment of our artistic legacy and a call to boldly innovate.”
Courtney Thomas is a writer and curator whose work appears in Texas Monthly, Slate, Sightlines, Glasstire, Texas Highways, and other publications. She holds BAs in Theatre and in Humanities from the University of Texas at Austin.
