The Decade-Long Journey Home: Inside Kitchen Dog Theater’s 35th Season at Its New Dallas Home

On Tim Johnson’s very first day as managing director of Kitchen Dog Theater (KDT) in 2014, he found out the company would have to leave its home of two decades at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (MAC). The following year, KDT launched a capital campaign for a new permanent home, with a series of temporary performance spaces lined up for the next two years in the meantime. “That’s where the adventure began,” Johnson says.

Eleven years after that fateful first day on the job and a decade after leaving the MAC, Johnson is part of the leadership team that’s brought KDT’s new Dallas-based home to life in 2026. The company envisions its new home not only as a space for its own productions, but a venue for other arts groups around the city and even a multi-purpose community gathering spot.

Johnson explains that KDT’s new home includes two sound-blocked performance spaces designed to accommodate multiple events at the same time. The first is a rehearsal space that can double as a venue for smaller productions, while the second is the March Theater, a black box with a recessed sprung floor that KDT leadership says has already become a major source of excitement for local dance companies. The new venue also includes a scene shop, dressing rooms, a pantry for catering and a visually dynamic lobby space. “It’s a space for everybody, and everybody will feel welcome here,” KDT Co-Artistic Director and Company Manager Tina Parker says.

The road to get to this new home has been anything but easy for KDT. From construction redesigns and weather delays to pandemic-era material shortages and price hikes that forced even greater fundraising efforts, the KDT team has faced no shortage of challenges in building its new home. It’s no wonder Parker humorously dubbed the process “a nonstop cavalcade of caca.”

With fundraising and construction efforts ongoing throughout the past decade, KDT often took to performing on the road in a variety of unique venues, like a baseball stadium and a vinyl record shop. Parker noted how the traveling productions made it difficult to maintain an audience and sell season subscriptions as they performed throughout the Metroplex.

Nonetheless, she says audiences still loved the shows. “It was actually rewarding, even though it was, on the producer’s side, extremely challenging because every show you had to reinvent the wheel,” Parker says, detailing the challenges that came from staging shows in non-traditional environments.

Now, however, KDT has entered its 35th season in its new, permanent home. “In the last two-ish years, we’ve been performing in non-theatrical spaces, so it’s going to be kind of fun and also kind of scary,” Parker says of the landmark season.

The season opened in February with an original company-created work, Pompeii, following in KDT’s rich history of promoting new works. KDT originally produced the musical comedy back in 2018 across a sold-out three-week run, making it the first time they’ve ever revisited a show.

The company’s commitment to new works is also seen in the aptly named Dream Hou$e, running April 9-May 3. The play follows Latina sisters who appear on an HGTV-style show as they consider selling their family home to capitalize on its recently gentrified neighborhood. KDT hosted a reading of the play in 2020 at its annual New Works Festival, which was hosted online due to the pandemic. Now, the show can officially make its way to the KDT stage. “It’s about what’s the meaning of home,” Parker says, calling that the “informal theme of the season” as well.

The season continues with Venus, a dark comedy running June 4-28 that follows a relationship that spirals into what the company calls a “spectacularly horrifying conclusion.” Parker explains that KDT chose the production in part because it will allow the company to spotlight the return of one of its founders, Sally Nystuen Vahle, who will be starring alongside Parker. “I’m really excited about that,” Parker says. “She and I’ve actually worked together, but never on stage.”

The season wraps with the D-Pac PUP Fest featuring six jury-selected staged readings from DFW high school students as well as the annual New Works Festival on June 13 and 27, complete with a Texas-focus this year. “We’re really excited to showcase the work of our family in our new house,” Parker says of the 35th season as a whole.

Parker and Johnson also look forward to continuing building connections and a community around KDT’s new space during this season and for many more years to come. “There was kind of a family that grew up around the MAC, like it became kind of a community center in a weird way for artists, and so I think that’s what this has the potential of offering,” Johnson says. “What I hope it offers is that it becomes a space for the city, and a place that people feel is home.”

—BRETT GREGA