The Theatre and its Double
I dream in three locations: my high school hallways, my grandmother’s house that has since been torn down, and the theater my mom worked at whose walls I was raised in.
My mom worked at this theater my whole life, named the Kalita Humphreys Theater. Near downtown Dallas, it sits at the top of a hill overlooking what we call Turtle Creek, a green watered pond reflecting the algae, moss, and turtle backs below. The building itself sits ominously with rounded white concrete walls stacked on an octagonal base like a cake pan, the base slanted on its edges fitting to the curve of the hill. The entrance to the theater guides its guests with a lobby encased in glass and laced with gold detailing. To enter, you walk up to golden railings bolted to a long shallow concrete staircase that is a deep red, and when rain paints its steps it turns an even darker red, blood like. In the summer, when the vicious Texas sun is trapped in the concrete, rain brings the stairs to life with steam rolling off its edges.
The mid century design of the building gives it an elegant swing and movement, and now, out of touch with modern designs, the theater might leave its guests gripping for a 1950s nostalgia. I have always admired its structure, and at times have even feared it. The Kalita has a great force to it I can feel. In the curvature of the stage, the height of its walls, the dark and warm wooden details. The theater is bold, sharp, and aligned with its surroundings. Looking at pictures of it pulls me into a trance.
The Dallas Theater Center, one of the longest standing theater companies in Dallas, commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design this multipurpose stage for the city in 1955. Busy with other projects, Wright agreed only if they would allow him to use a plan already in his files. I imagine Mr.Wright shuffling through cases of old projects and plans to come across this layout, thinking huh…this’ll do, but to me this place was a centerpiece of my youth.
At the time, the design was considered innovative, based on Wright’s long standing use of “organic architecture”, hence its flowing curves, long lines that leaves the eyes dizzy, and its uncanny harmony with the land it rests on. I never knew this growing up, but it makes sense when you’re walking around inside its walls. There is this odd tether I would feel, like a threaded shock of energy in my soles, into the floor, and through the ground below. Then even deeper than that.
*
My mother was a stagehand, the head of the wardrobe department. This meant she took care of all the costumes for each play, dressed the leading actors and was their right hand, getting to know them intimately; how they took their coffee, what drink they liked after a show, the names of their wives and husbands, and exactly how they wanted their dressing room laid out, down to the angle of their hair brush.
As a kid, I was surrounded by the lights, the crowds, the glamor. Powder puffs, wigs, and elegant costumes. Props of all kinds, sets and wild backstage tricks. I so vividly remember sitting in the dressing rooms with my mom while she laughed and chatted with the actors over glasses of dark liquor, the bright bulbs of the vanities tinting everything in an amber light that shades my memories. Sometimes I would sit backstage, just out of view of the audience, watching people I knew play characters I’d come to love, knowing every trick the audience didn't, making the play unfold in all its magic. I think I watched over a hundred plays in that theater, from behind and in front of the stage.
The chaos thirty minutes before curtain was always my favorite part. Stagehands in black are making their final placements of props, actors are warming up with singing echoing through the halls. You can hear anxious chatter and the fussy flutter of play bills from the audience; the anticipation was invigorating as a kid. Running around seeing how I could help, put a prop here, mop the stage there, help an actress tie up her corset with a pinch of the hook and eyes. I never wanted to be on the stage, the real shit happens behind the curtain.
But these scenes, as formative as they were, are never what I dream about. I dream about that building. That theater. I’m trapped inside its rounded concrete, lost in the maze of eyes watching me from every corner.
There is an almost indescribable eerie feeling to the architecture of this place. It is a feeling that’s vividness has not escaped me after almost 10 years, resting in my unconscious mind visiting me in my most anxious and feverish nights. This building is burned, black and charred, into my memory. I can close my eyes and walk through every hallway, every room. I can feel the inside’s cold red concrete under my feet, feel the white pebbled walls on my fingertips. I know how the velvet of the amphitheater cushions move under my palms, the way the metal stairs echo and how the paint chips off of them under my steps. And I know the feeling of knowing someone is there you cannot see.
After the sparkling lights and painted lips, once the theater has died down and everyone has left, you are still never alone.
*
My mom was the first person to start her shift and always the last to leave, either doing laundry for the later show or from the night before. This meant we were often alone, the two of us, before any of the other stagehands got there.
The running lore was that there was a ghost that somberly walked these halls, named Kalita, a woman who died in a plane crash, supposedly near the grounds. I don’t know which came first, the theater or its namesake, but I’d like to think Kalita’s body rests right under center stage and she watches each play unbeknownst to us and the audience. Many of the stagehands have described seeing a woman walking through the building after everyone has left, after the doors have been locked, and followed her thinking she was a patron stalking after hours. But round the corner just behind her steps, and she’d vanish. My mom and other stagehands have seen things fly off shelves, objects or props gone missing overnight, doors slamming with no one around.
Older now, I’d think this was all post show drunken jokes or a story to make me scared, but I once had my own experience that transcends any folktale, and one that has molded the way I view the world and life after death.
Alone in the building, my mom outside the stage door for a smoke, I was eating in the green room. The room is laid out with that same red tile that maps out the rest of the building. Small foldable tables with metal chairs sat in the room’s center. There were dark green cushions attached to the walls, tracing the circumference of the room making one long levitating couch, all framed with a pale wood. I still feel those dark green cushions, the rips in the leather and how they were always cold to the touch.
This is the part I remember more than anything and I can see it in my memory like a scene from a movie. I could project it onto a screen, watch it over and over again.
Sitting on the cushions eating a hotdog caked in bright yellow mustard, dripped from the buns edge onto my shirt making a glob of phosphorescent tang. I reached for a napkin on the table, and as I did one of the chairs, as if pushed full force by arms not visible to my human eye; the metal legs of the chair on the smooth floor skidding easily like skates on ice, and propelled with a harsh thrust from one side of the room to the other.
The chair had been untouched by me. I was alone in the room. Alone in the building. Or so I thought. A shock of fear and confusion ran through me and my stomach gnawed and anxiously sank. I ran to find my mom outside. She was taking slow, calm drags from her cigarette. I cried big tears from my little eyes. She tried to bring me to some state of calm to explain myself. I don't remember her reaction to what I said, but she later told me I couldn’t have lied through those tears.
*
There’s no way I can really explain this. Some people I’ve told simply don’t believe me, understandably, at times I even question myself. Did I really see that, a chair flying across a room? Was there some magnetic pull from the earth’s core that science can explain? The game of a trickster maybe, invisible fishing wire tied to its frame? Did my kid eyes deceive me?
But, more than anything, I want to believe it was Kalita. And If you could step foot in that building, you’d believe it was her too.
In my dreams, I’m there. I walk those halls. The halls, the halls, the halls. Dizzying round halls that follow the curvature of the building's exterior. I walk those halls, how I think Kalita might have, my mind lost in a fog, my legs not beneath me but somehow still carrying me. I just walk, in circles, up and down and up and down the stairs and through the rounded halls, tracing my finger along the wall like when I did as a kid. Feeling the bumps beneath my pads. Dust collects on the grooves.
Other dreams I’m trapped in the bathroom stalls, or hunched over the rusted ceramic sink, my teeth falling out and clinking against the tiled floor. I’d be locked in the bathroom, bolted from the outside. Then hearing laughter and cheers from the stage door slowly faded out and I was left by myself, alone, with nothing but loose teeth piling up on my feet.
I had always had an uncomfortable feeling inside the theater. And sometimes when I would finally feel a little easier, shrug off that queasy feeling, the air would tighten, and remind me that I was not alone. I do believe it was Kalita, or some other paranormal force that pushed that chair. But even without that happening, the walls have watching eyes. Something rests inside there. Something sits in every room waiting for a visitor.
*
I recently visited the Guggenheim, a museum in New York’s upper east side, also designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The museum board and Wright’s concept for the space was titled “the temple of the spirit”. I'm biased, but I don’t believe that is a coincidence. It is the only building who’s rounded and stacked architecture I’ve found comparable to The Kalita’s, standing like a tornado’s spiral. The stark white walls, and the wooden details. And the bathroom, the bathroom was uncannily similar. Not just in design, but in feeling. Antiseptic, cold, and on looking. I felt like I was back in my dream, my teeth scattering to the floor.
Despite the uneasy feeling I get when thinking about The Kalita and the way it snakes into my dreams, it also brings me a strange and seemingly unfounded joy. There is an odd connection I have with this theater, one of a cosmic nature. One of a truly paranormal nature. Maybe a connection with Kalita herself. A connection I cannot shake nor do I think I ever will.
This one building and this one experience has altered the way I think about life, death, love, and grief. Ghosts are not lost souls peering through two oval shaped holes cut out of a bedsheet. Nor do they live in closets or under beds or carry candelabras and scream bloody murder. It’s something asking to be seen. To be heard. It’s something trying to get your attention. It’s something saying Hey, I’m here.
There can be comfort in just letting go to the unexplainable. Letting the loose ends unfurl into a maddening knot of unanswerable questions.
Over quarantine, when I was back in Texas having been jolted out of NYC due to the pandemic, one day I biked to the theater on a steamy summer afternoon. The Kalita rested there as it always did, like it was waiting for me. I sat on those red steps and smoked a joint, staring up at its rounded walls, the eyes in the windows staring back.
