If you’ve lived in Dallas for a while, you’ve heard of Aldredge House, the magnificent mansion at 5500 Swiss Avenue designed by Hal Thomson and Marion Fooshee. It’s the jewel in the neighborhood’s crown and Dallas’ only historic house museum.
To our knowledge, it’s also the only home in America to host a living play.
What’s a living play, you ask?
You’ve probably been to a stately home with docents in each room telling you about its history, but The Friends of Aldredge House have taken the concept further.
In 2018 three Friends of Aldredge House board members began to brainstorm ideas for bringing Dallas’ history to life. Marianne Howells, Rene Schmidt, and Evelyn Montgomery decided the best way to write a story about the original homeowners, who, by the way, were not the Aldredge family.
In 1915, West Texas rancher William Lewis was keen to make his social mark in Dallas and knew that began with a grand house. His young bride, Willie, was not enthused, to say the least. Lewis forged ahead, and for two years Thomson and Fooshee pulled out all the proverbial stops, creating a home that would not only stand out but also stand the test of time.
Completed in 1917, what you see today is almost exactly what William and Willie saw during the four short years they lived here.
The Rebel of The Aldredge House
As I mentioned, Willie was not an enthusiastic participant in the process. Even though she was a debutante, she was more comfortable in a cottage than as the lady of a grand house. Alone in an enormous mansion while Will was off ranching in West Texas, she was not a happy camper.
She was also a bit of a rebel. Ladies of her set did not do much but manage homes, entertain, and raise children. That was not enough for Willie, so she wrote a book about her life, Willie, A Girl From a Town Called Dallas, which is an excellent read and available on Amazon. It’s from this book that the board members took the storyline for the living play, The Writer and The Rancher.
“I wanted to give the history of this house some sparkle,” Howells said. “I thought if we kept it to a tight time frame and portrayed when the Lewis family was residing here, visitors would walk away with a real feeling of how people lived then.”
Building on Their Success
Although the first iteration was successful, Howells felt they could create something even more enjoyable.
“We received a $10,000 grant from the Communities Foundation in January 2020, right before the pandemic,” Howells said. “It allowed us to hire a local playwright, Isabella Russell-Ides, and a director, Susan Sargeant. Karla Peterson upgraded our costumes. We worked on it through March, stopped for a while due to the pandemic, and rehearsed on Zoom. We returned in the summer and held the performance outside in the summer of 2021 for two months.”
Russell-Ides recreated the play with actual interaction between the characters. They enlarged the suffragette movement part of the play to highlight the historic 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment giving most women the right to vote. Pay attention to that word most when you see the play.
A cast of 10 professional and potentially professional actors brings a fantastic amount of talent to this production. The audience moves with them as they move inside and outside the home, learning about Willie’s life in the early 1920s.
“I think the programming and events we have at Aldredge House open people’s eyes,” Melanie Vanlandingham, president of the board of Friends of Aldredge, said. “It’s perfectly situated to tell the stories of the blossoming of Dallas. Aldredge House is at the heart of Dallas’ history.”
By all accounts, the living play has been immensely successful and is at capacity every month. Candy, her granddaughter Hattie, and I all attended last Saturday.
“My 8-year-old granddaughter was mesmerized,” Candy said. “This is a wonderfully creative way to tell the story of Dallas when it was just a budding city.”
The Writer and The Rancher is presented on the second Saturday of every month except for July and August.
Reserve your place for the next event at friendsofaldredgehouse.org
