The Ochre House’s tenaciously original, grassroots approach to live theater endows both young artists and novice audiences with transformative experience. We’ll deliver a rewarding return on your funding investment.
The Ochre House Theater was founded in 2009 with a specific calling. Matthew Posey, a veteran actor, writer, director, and native Texan, saw an opportunity to create something unique to live theater in Dallas.
His vision included an intimate, informal space, in an underserved location. Staff artists would produce provocative works that would seduce experienced drama enthusiasts, but also entice neophytes to risk their first encounters with the live stage.
Everything would be original. The scenery, the props, the live music, and the stories would be created in-house. Young artists, every gender and race, would gain career-building experience they would struggle to get in larger operations.
Every script would be exclusively Ochre House. Audiences would ponder the substance of novel concepts they just absorbed, rather than critique the style of a well-worn familiar standard.
By every measure, the dream has congealed, and the enterprise has succeeded. The theater has drawn a stream of curious adventurers to Fair Park sans the State Fair or Dallas Music Hall. We’ve built community with the restaurants, bars, shops and galleries of the Expo Park neighborhood and we are an acknowledged asset.
We have ambitious goals and grand plans for reaching broader audiences and contributing to fairgrounds redevelopment. We need intrepid, altruistic partners to help us triumph.
Who is the Ochre House Theater?
We’re small but feisty. We use our size to our advantage. The Ochre House environment provides an intimacy and immediacy with the artists. The audience becomes a part of the experience and creates something new and unique with each performance.
We’re approachable. Ochre House provides low risk theater experience for an inquisitive audience new to live productions, but includes enough meat to satisfy the veteran patron.
We’re avant garde. We take an alt-theater approach in adopting new forms and varieties of theater, such as New Vaudeville. Both artists and audiences find new routes to authenticity.
We’re original. Ochre House’s reliance on new works created internally (with live music and imaginative devices like puppets) builds a brand that is unique to Dallas live theater. This pioneering attitude supplies solid footing to build valuable experience for young artists.
We’re educational. We mold young artists through creative experience and significant responsibility. We teach young audiences to unlock new experiences and ideas.
We’re provocative. Ochre House challenges audiences, rather than spoon-feed them familiar tropes. You will not see a revival of Our Town here.
Ochre House Values
We believe that theater is a bully pulpit and an excellent grass roots platform for positive social change. In a world increasingly polarized and isolated by viewing the world on a screen-based echo chamber, a human experience shared by actors and audience is essential. It’s a mirror into society and a starting point for discourse.
And that human experience should be shared by all humans, regardless of their innate characteristics, cultural heritage, and adopted views. A diverse world is a more robust and interesting world.
We believe theater should take risks and expand comfort zones. Audiences need stories and characters that face communal challenges and resolve them in a way that broadens perspectives and compels alternatives.
We believe live theater is immediate, evolving, and malleable. No two performances are the same and no two audiences respond identically. No other dramatic presentation has the same intimacy.
We believe theater fosters community. Our audience members and patrons return again and again and will deliberate what they’ve seen and heard from the stage. We’re humbled by their investment.
We believe theater is a refuge. The audience can escape their personal struggles for a couple of hours and enter a different world. We don’t have to make them comfortable necessarily, but we do strive to take them out of themselves. Theater can be a place of healing, where rituals are performed.
Ochre House According
to the Press
“Attention to detail, quirky mannerisms, a meticulous balance of nuance, irony and layers of symbolism and meaning, made this splendid show memorable and engaging.”
Christopher Soden, Sharp Critic, March 25, 2018
“…definitely unlike any other theatre you will see in the Metroplex.”
Mark-Brian Sonna, The Column, April 29, 2017
You never know what to expect at Ochre House Theater, which attracts a passionate following for original shows that mix new stories and music by its intensely committed company in a small, intimate house near Fair Park.
Nancy Churnin. Dallas Morning News, January 29, 2017
“…Ochre House Theater, a scrappy little Dallas company known for its nonstop parade of original work.”
Nancy Churnin, Dallas Morning News, October 30, 2016
“…as an original work, I found great joy and satisfaction in seeing it come to life for the first time. This occasionally bizarre but consistently entertaining production is absolutely worth the trip to Dallas.”
Rebecca Roberts, The Column, April 20, 2019
“It’s rare to find theatre where the pleasure and joy a company takes in creating a sublime, memorable experience is so tangible. So formidable. The Ochre House thrives on embracing the strange, the giddy, the ridiculous, the defiantly poetic.”
Christopher Soden, Sharp Critic, February 23, 2019
“It was a dizzying spectacle, a memorable feat.”
Lindsey Wilson, Culture Map Dallas, Dec 28, 2014
“Their physicality and vocal inflections immediately establish characters so well drawn it’s like a punch to the gut.”
“I can honestly say that I’ve never attended a show where an actor Duct-tapes a (cleverly ventilated) plastic bag over his head and we’re then asked to direct our attention elsewhere for another scene.”
Lindsey Wilson, Culture Map Dallas, January 14, 2013
“…when Antonio Arrebola and Delilah Buitrón Arrebola stamp their feet on Ochre House Theater’s handmade wooden stage, the entire room reverberates.”
Manuel Mendoza, Dallas Morning News, September 11, 2018
“Irreverent indecency is a hallmark of the avant-garde. At Dallas’ Ochre House Theater, where all of the content is generated from within, the vulgar hijinks are sometimes carried out by life-size, Japanese Bunraku-style rubber puppets…”
Manuel Mendoza, Dallas Morning News, September 11, 2020
Matthew Posey’s latest original work at the Ochre House is a remarkable creation, perhaps a work of genius. But go see it only if you’re willing to spend a couple of hours in hell.
Manuel Mendoza, Dallas Morning News, February 23, 2012
“Watching Posey take Christhelmet through his arc of redemption sweeps up the audience on a breathtaking ride far removed from the venue’s limitations.”
Alexandra Bonifield, Dallas Morning News, July 17, 2014
“Matt Posey’s group of artists at Ochre House keeps turning out some of the most daring and original theater in Dallas. He writes and stages completely original shows six or more times a year — always arresting, almost always as funny as they are dark and strange.”
Lawson Taitte, Dallas Morning News, March 15, 2013
