You don’t have to look too hard to find signs that the city doesn’t pay much attention to the Kalita Humphreys Theater.
As in: There’s an actual sign planted behind the only theater Frank Lloyd Wright designed, facing Turtle Creek, that promises the December 2020 completion of a 2017 bond project that eventually fixed a leaky roof for around $483,000. The sign lists David Blewett as the District 14 council member, though the one-termer lost his seat to Paul Ridley four years ago.
Around the corner, the entrance facing Lemmon Avenue is streaked with black grime — dirt, maybe, or algae — and looks woeful and shabby. The rotten, rusted fountains designed by Wright remain on both sides of the building, filled only with rainwater.
But the entrance facing Blackburn Street, with the signage bearing the theater’s name in Wright’s signature font, has recently been repainted. It’s shocking how good it looks. Not quite … new. But also far less tumbledown than it used to.
“Amazing what a coat of paint will do to a building,” Uptown Players co-founder Craig Lynch told me Wednesday. He mentioned that the HVAC unit was also back on the roof where it belongs. And that the freight elevator was actually working this week.
“The building is still standing,” said Lynch, whose Uptown Players use the theater some 20 weeks out of the year, including a run of Xanadu about to wrap. As far as Lynch is concerned, the Kalita “is in no worse shape today than it’s been” since preservationists and architects first started fretting over the historic landmark‘s condition and drawing up plans for its salvation from the slow-motion slide toward ruination.
The theater was completed in 1959 for $1 million, and gifted to the city by the Dallas Theater Center in 1974. In the ensuing years, it became one of the most “misunderstood, mistreated, misused, mismanaged, maligned and generally neglected” buildings in town, my colleague Mark Lamster wrote in 2018. Back then it looked like the city, in concert with the DTC, was ready to tend to its languishing landmark; back then, there was some urgency. Yet the city’s sorry, sordid history involving Kalita caretaking still doesn’t have an ending.
“Do we want to save the Kalita or not?” my colleague Lamster wondered in August 2023. A month later, Texas Monthly jumped into the fray by insisting that the Kalita “is now a shell of its former self.” And only two months ago, American Theatre weighed in on its “sorry state” by wondering “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Kalita?”
But to my surprise, Lynch isn’t as worried as the rest of us. He said, sure, from the outside, the Kalita “may look like it’s falling apart.” And inside the bathrooms are small and terrible. It’s not very ADA-friendly. And it needs new carpet. And there’s the freight elevator. And, and, and.
“There are deferred issues that need to be resolved, and as a theater company, there are issues within the facility, but it’s not falling apart like some people are thinking it is,” Lynch said. “Is it functional? Yes. Does it need some love and care? Yes. But it’s still a treasured jewel.”
I asked Lynch about the piles of news pieces lamenting its deterioration. He said he ignores them.
“I would just encourage those who have reservations about the operations and aesthetics to come see a show and see how it works. Then they can form their own opinions,” he said. “There are too many people pointing fingers. Seriously. It’s everyone’s responsibility to take care of what they’re inhabiting.”
I’d called Lynch to get his take on the Kalita’s latest trip to Dallas City Hall, where, last week, the City Council extended the Dallas Theater Center’s lease at the Kalita until the end of September 2028. The council also agreed to provide “direct financial support in an amount not to exceed $150,000 to the Dallas Theater Center.”
Whenever the Kalita shows up at City Hall, it’s usually accompanied by a solid day’s worth of drama. Not this time. There were no accusations from the horseshoe of a “bait and switch” as there was in 2023 when the DTC presented a $308 million renovation plan, no grandstanding speeches about a “vanity project,” no lamentations about demolition by neglect. There were only the brief, deadpan tones of Paul Ridley, who said the extension would give the Kalita’s tenants, including the DTC and Uptown Players, time to plan upcoming seasons while the city works with them “to plan the transition in the management of this facility.”
I can’t tell you what that last part means. Because nobody really knows.
I asked Kevin Moriarty, DTC’s executive director. He texted only that he was grateful for the lease extension, which will give the city “time to decide [the Kalita’s] future.” He referred all further questions to the city’s Office of Arts and Culture.
OAC’s assistant director, Glenn Ayars, said Wednesday this is “a complex, multilayered situation we find ourselves in.” We spoke for a good half hour, during which I must have uttered “kicking the can down the road” and “back to square one” maybe a dozen times. “I wish I could give you a more solid answer,” Ayars said.
I asked whether the city might pull from the two plans already proposed for a Kalita makeover: the 2010 master plan, which estimated that a full-blown renovation would have cost around $40 million, and the one that followed a decade later by New York-based Diller Scofidio + Renfro, for which the Dallas Theater Center spent $2 million at the behest of a City Hall that hadn’t invested a fraction of that in the Kalita in decades. Neither was ever approved by the City Council, which essentially kicked Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s extravagant $308 million plan out of City Hall in January 2023.
“It’s a yes-and situation,” Ayars said. “We will look at what suggestions have been made, the needs of our groups and their capacities. You talk about starting from square one. We’re starting from a place where we’re not cutting ourselves off from viable solutions.”
So we’re back at square one. Kicking the can down Turtle Creek.
I expect this may be the last we’ll talk about the Kalita until two or three years from now when the city expects to start spending some $9 million in 2024 bond money to repair decades’ worth of deferred maintenance. I am not sure how far $9 million will go in 2028. But I look forward to seeing a new sign planted behind the Kalita.
