Finding His Niche: Actor/Playwright Parker Davis Gray Carves out his place

Lindsey Wilson·
Dallas/Ft WorthTexas StudioTheater
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Parker Davis Gray is not afraid to be weird. The SMU theater grad has played silly, sinister, sympathetic, and sometimes just plain psychotic on basically every professional stage in Dallas-Fort Worth since 2016; if he’s not taking a risk, he’s not satisfied.

That goes for his other professions, as well. Since 2023, Gray has served as executive director of Second Thought Theatre, where he is also making his professional debut as a playwright later this year.

“When it seems like my calendar’s full, I’ll just go and give myself something else to do,” Gray laughs. “I’m all about stretching different muscles.”

Coming from the small Texas town of Combine, about 30 minutes southeast of Dallas, Gray always had his sights set on acting. Right out the gate, he made big choices in Kitchen Dog Theater’s especially bloody production of Feathers and Teeth in 2016. Two years later, he turned heads in WaterTower Theatre’s hilariously scandalous Hand to God, co-starring a profane puppet which Gray also operated.

Behind the scenes, Gray worked as operations manager and later casting associate at Undermain Theatre in Deep Ellum from 2017-2019. But then an entire year’s worth of professional acting work suddenly disappeared at the start of 2020 with the Pandemic.

The year prior, Gray had taken a six-week playwriting class taught by Matt Lyle at Theatre Three. “I was adamant that I wasn’t going to create pandemic art,” Gray says. “I was already mourning what I was afraid of happening, how every play would be about lockdown. I actively ran away from being the person who wrote that.”

Instead, Gray found his niche: horror.

“Audiences for horror movies are some of the largest out there,” he says, citing the original Halloween, Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House, and Tim Curry’s terrifying turn in the mini-series IT as favorites. Gray also appeared in 2023’s locally produced slasher flick The Finale. “I don’t understand why there wouldn’t be a similarly big audience in the theater world. Filling a void like that in American theater felt like a worthwhile endeavor; it gave me a reason to write.”

Gray began playwriting again in earnest in early 2021, producing Incarnate, which will run Oct. 15-Nov. 1, 2025, at Second Thought. Incarnate centers on a middle-aged man who kidnaps and imprisons a young woman because he believes her to be his father reincarnated. Both the man and woman are painters who, Gray explains, are still creating art under grief.

“He’s trying to interact with his father’s soul and heal while also grappling with destroying someone else’s life in the process,” says Gray. “Horror doesn’t have to be about confronting the supernatural monster in front of you. The monster doesn’t even have to be tangible. The monster can be yourself and what you’re doing.”

Incarnate was inspired by the accidental drowning of Gray’s father in 2017. “Nothing wildly traumatic had happened in my life up until then,” he says. “How do you go on and create anything when you’re trapped under great grief? It made me think, ‘if my father was reincarnated, what would—or wouldn’t—I do to talk to him?’”

The play received a staged reading in Undermain’s Whither Goest Thou America new works festival in 2022, where Second Thought’s artistic director Carson McCain saw it and campaigned to add it to their season. McCain and Gray had already discussed theming the 2025 season around local writers, given the sold-out success of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning the year before.

“Of the 730-plus people that came to see it, 430 of them were first-time Second Thought attendees,” Gray shares. “At first, we wondered if people were just especially interested in the plot, and then we realized that Arbery is from here. He has family still in Dallas. Audiences want to support him. The average theatergoer doesn’t know who Lauren Gunderson is, but they have probably seen Blake Hackler onstage.”

Hackler, a member of Dallas Theater Center’s resident acting company, has premiered several of his own plays at Second Thought. His latest, Healed, runs April 23-May 10, 2025. Your Wife’s Dead Body by prolific Dallas actor Jenny Ledel rounds out the season, running July 9-26, 2025.

“When I started writing, I felt increasingly guilty asking my professional theatermaker friends to read my plays,” Gray says. “That is largely why we created Thought Process, a year-long, monthly meeting of local writers where they can develop their plays, hear their work read out loud, get feedback, and explore opportunities for the play’s future. We just chose the eight writers for this, our second year.”

Second Thought is also debuting a newly created professional developmental program for directors. The Associate Directing Cohort also lasts a year, and allows each of the three participants to assistant-direct a mainstage show, do ongoing scene study with McCain, and helm the readings of Thought Process plays.

“The idea is that these two cohorts will collaborate across mediums, and everyone will become involved in different steps of each other’s process,” says Gray. “We were looking at what niches needed to be filled in DFW theater, how we could invest in the local community, and these were it. Every dream Carson and I have had is coming to fruition.”

—LINDSEY WILSON

Lindsey Wilson

Lindsey Wilson is a Dallas-based arts writer and critic with a journalism master's from Syracuse University and an undying love for chips and salsa. When not at the theater (which is rare), she enjoys reading, playing with her dogs, and traveling. Photo by Jeffrey Hummel.