Rebecca Greene Udden News

Main Street Theater (MST) opens its 46th Season with the regional premiere of Darwin in Malibu by Crispin Whittell.

MST’s MainStage season will open with the wildly whimsical and equally intelligent Darwin in Malibu by Crispin Whittell, directed by Udden. It’s a meeting of the minds when Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, meet on the beach in Malibu a century after their deaths!

This December Main Street Theater is bringing back the holiday favorites Miss Bennet and The Wickhams: Christmas at Pemberley via live, staged readings on Zoom. Main Street has been offering the Pemberley plays - based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and written by acclaimed playwright Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon - for the last few seasons.

Main Street Theater is now in its 45th Season and has announced a new array of virtual performances for theater lovers of all ages.

Main Street Theater is now in its 45th Season and has announced a new array of virtual performances for theater lovers of all ages.

4th Wall Theatre Company, Houston's home for extraordinary performances up close, will launch of Beyond the 4th Wall a?' a series of interviews that invite audiences behind the scenes for candid, intimate, one-on-one conversations with professional theatre creatives.

4th Wall Theatre Company, Houston's home for extraordinary performances up close, will launch of Beyond the 4th Wall a?' a series of interviews that invite audiences behind the scenes for candid, intimate, one-on-one conversations with professional theatre creatives.

Costume designers, seamstresses, and performers with sewing skills have joined the effort to manufacture face masks and other personal protective equipment.

Main Street Theater (MST)'s 45th Season will include six (6) productions on its MainStage and seven (7) at its Theater for Youth for 2020-2021.

Donna Southern Schmidt, a local, professional costume designer who works regularly with MST as well as other Houston theaters, has found a way to make good use of her forced hiatus by sewing masks for medical workers. But these are not ordinary masks. She's using fabric remnants from plays she designed for Main Street Theater (MST). 

In an effort to stay connected through the current COVID 19 crisis, Main Street Theater is launching a new online program, Art Together with Main Street Theater.

Narratively ELLIOT, A SOLDIER'S FUGUE simply combines three soldiers in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.  They represent a grandfather, a father, and a son who all go through similar experiences in the wars of their respective eras.

Main Street Theater (MST) is offering Houston audiences the beautifully human and heartbreaking Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue. Elliota?? is the first in a trilogy of plays by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Quiara Alegría Hudes' (In the Heights). Houston theatergoers will have the rare opportunity to follow Hudes' Elliot Trilogy with  Stages' production of Water by the Spoonful, Part II, also running in February. Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company will produce a staged reading of the final installment of the trilogy, The Happiest Song Plays Last, at MST during the first week of March.

Main Street Theater, Stages Repertory Theatre, and Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company, in connection with Sin Muros: A Latinx Theater Festival at Stages, present Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Quiara Alegría Hudes' Elliot Trilogy. While all are stand-alone plays, they follow the story of Elliot and his mother across the wars in which they served and through their lives as they strive for peace and connection. The trilogy revolves around Elliot Ortiz, a Puerto Rican Marine veteran from Philadelphia. Hudes told American Theatre Magazine that Elliot's story is a?oeboth quintessentially American and a great representation of the Puerto Rican experience, including the rough patches and demons [Elliot] has had to survive to become stable and successful.a?? Elliot is based on her own cousin of the same name.

Main Street Theater, Stages Repertory Theatre, and Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company, in connection with Sin Muros: A Latinx Theater Festival at Stages, present Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Quiara Alegría Hudes' Elliot Trilogy. While all are stand-alone plays, they follow the story of Elliot and his mother across the wars in which they served and through their lives as they strive for peace and connection. The trilogy revolves around Elliot Ortiz, a Puerto Rican Marine veteran from Philadelphia. Hudes told American Theatre Magazine that Elliot's story is 'both quintessentially American and a great representation of the Puerto Rican experience, including the rough patches and demons [Elliot] has had to survive to become stable and successful.' Elliot is based on her own cousin of the same name.

Main Street Theater (MST) has extended its 44th Season opening production, Tom Stoppard's newest play, The Hard Problem, through October 13. MST and Executive Artistic Director Rebecca Greene Udden have long been the go-to source for Stoppard's plays for Houston, for Texas, and even the nation (MST's production of The Coast of Utopia trilogy drew audiences from across the U.S.). It's fitting, then, that MST would produce the Regional Premiere of Stoppard's latest work. 

Main Street Theater (MST) opens its 44th Season with Tom Stoppard's newest play, The Hard Problem. MST and Executive Artistic Director Rebecca Greene Udden have long been the go-to source for Stoppard's plays for Houston, for Texas, and even the nation (MST's production of The Coast of Utopia trilogy drew audiences from across the U.S.). It's fitting, then, that MST would produce the Regional Premiere of Stoppard's latest work. 

The director has decided to look at the more giggle-worthy elements of PRIVATE LIVES, and has avoided some of the darker implications of this Noel Coward classic. Audiences should eat this one up like a buttered brioche with coffee the morning after a sordid affair.

Main Street Theater (MST) offers the perfect sparkling summer refreshment in the form of the wit and wisdom of Noel Coward's Private Lives. "It is by far my favorite of his plays," shares Coward specialist and the production's director Claire Hart-Palumbo. "In many ways Private Lives is an extraordinary play. The Twentieth Century equivalent of the Well-Made Play, it is elegance personified. The language is intelligent and delightfully witty. It's about the generation that was ravaged by World War I. He chose to write in a more familiar and recognizable style, with humor, wit, vivacity, and charm, but his characters express the same doubts and questioning with an elegance that is inevitably entertaining and astonishingly memorable." Along with Hart-Palumbo's insights, MST Executive Artistic Director Rebecca Greene Udden, who has a delicious cameo role in the show, offers, "It's just so brilliantly funny. I think we could all use a good laugh right now."

The Houston Equity Festival is a collection of local professional actors, all members of the union Actors' Equity Association, each of whom is mounting her/his own show during the summer and fall of 2019.  Actor Dain Geist spearheaded the creation of the Festival "While we may be individual artists," says Geist, "Together we help to build a community."