a 2024 interview<\/a>. \u201cSince we don’t produce anything we haven’t written ourselves, sometimes the script gets tweaked all the way up to the opening. It helps to have familiarity with our process, which happens fast.\u201d<\/p>\nFor one thing, Ochre House audiences are right in the actors\u2019 faces, 45 seats wedged around a slightly elevated stage. For another, the plays written and directed by Posey and his cohorts call on their casts to tackle the human condition head-on as well as metaphorically, singing, dancing and acting in a physical, handmade method of theater-making.<\/p>\n
Puppetry, original songs and ornate makeup and costumes representing historical periods \u2014 usually standing in for the present \u2014 are a cornerstone of the Ochre House approach.<\/p>\n
Bathtub Full of Milk, which was supposed to open Nov. 4, is a prime example. It revolves around Milk and Ollie, who are trying to make it amid other artists, musicians and working-class families living in century-old, low-rent tenement buildings as the Vietnam War rages, according to a description that has since been taken down from the Ochre House website:<\/p>\n
\u201cMassive cultural change is in the wind. A lost generation calls for revolution. Fat cats are making money off the war machine and thousands of kids have been cannon fodder in an unwinnable war. Violence threatens the home front as well, as different groups try to break the unjust systems that are rigged against them. How do you make art in such repressive times?\u201d<\/p>\n
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Posey did it with a passion for telling the stories of ordinary if unusual people, though Ochre House did venture into takes on real-life figures like Picasso and Charles Manson. A gentle giant of a man, an imposing figure on stage, Posey survived being shot outside a bar in the Ochre House neighborhood in 2017.<\/p>\n
A Houston native, Posey earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in theater from Texas Tech University, interned at the Alley Theatre and later received a master\u2019s in film from the American Film Institute during a dozen years spent in Los Angeles playing character roles in films and TV series.<\/p>\n
He built Ochre House on his earlier work as founder of Deep Ellum Theater Garage in the 1980s, when the neighborhood was becoming a haven for edgy art. Around the same time, Katherine Owens and Raphael Parry were starting Undermain Theater in the basement of a Deep Ellum residential building.<\/p>\n
Posey introduced Owens to her future husband, Bruce DuBose, with whom he had worked with in an experimental group called On the Edge. Later, he became an Undermain company member after returning from L.A.<\/p>\n
Tributes to Posey\u2019s talent and generosity have poured in on social media, citing him as both inspiration and benefactor, giving roles and other jobs to theater artists trying to start or restart their careers.<\/p>\n
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In a Facebook post, Drew Wall, an actor who went on to become director of operations at Second Thought Theatre, called Posey \u201cone of the most insane, unshakeable, inspiring, combative and wild-ass theater makers in this town,\u201d mentioning that he had recruited Wall to help build out the Ochre House space, paid well, bought lunch almost every day and picked up bar tabs nightly. \u201cHe took care of me and encouraged me and helped me figure out what I wanted to do and how I could do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Frequent Ochre House costume designer Ryan Matthieu Smith wrote a poem on Facebook about Posey and the pieces of an outfit lying on his floor that he was making for a future production. It reads in part:<\/p>\n
Careful not to step on the future<\/p>\n
we had already begun making.<\/p>\n
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There was going to be another rehearsal.<\/p>\n
we would somehow make possible.<\/p>\n
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There was going to be Matthew<\/p>\n
inside this beautiful thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Writer-director Matthew Posey is pictured during a 2018 rehearsal of the flamenco-inspired production of Picasso: Matador de\u00a0Mlaga, at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,93542,87998,89866],"class_list":["post-457541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-performing-arts","tag-tp-dallas","tag-tp-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}