Houston’s always been a city that looks forward. Since its beginnings on a sleepy bayou Downtown, the energy here has been one that embraces the future, building on the past. That sentiment is especially true with Main Street Theater. The Rice Village arts organization, which also runs Main Street Theater for Youth in Midtown, celebrates its 50th anniversary with the 2025–2026 season. From the theater’s start in a space near the Rice campus, to its place today as an award-winning company, Main Street Theater has always celebrated what’s new, even as it’s borrowed from what came before.

“We started doing poetry readings,” says Rebecca Greene Udden, Main Street’s cofounder and executive artistic director.

Udden graduated from Rice University before heading to the University of Tennessee to pursue a master’s degree in theater. She’d been involved in performances at Rice but had no formal theater training. She liked being part of productions, however, and realized that, if she wanted to work in theater professionally, she should up her game. In Tennessee, she worked as part of a summer repertory theater in Gatlinburg, which was run by several people from the University of Tennessee’s drama department. A discussion with her friend Becky Bonar led to what would become Udden’s life’s work.

“We were sitting in the graduate student lounge having coffee, and I said, ‘You know, I haven’t really had an artistic thought since I’ve been here,’” says Udden. Neither the academics nor the department politics were for her. “We thought, ‘Well, why don’t we go back to Texas?’”

In the end, Udden returned to Houston alone in 1974 while her friend finished her degree. She got a part-time job working for Rev. John Worrell, the director of Autry House. The space, a community center run by the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, was near the Rice campus and had a long association as a student and faculty gathering place in addition to its church functions. Udden’s salary was around $400 a month, but working for Worrell came with a terrific benefit: She had his blessing to use Autry House as a theater space.

That’s where Main Street Theater was born.

Turns out Worrell was a fan of poet T. S. Eliot, so Udden corralled a group of her friends from Rice to do a series of readings beginning in January 1975, including Eliot Cycles Parts I–III and Murder in the Cathedral.

After that, it was full speed ahead. Udden and her band of players put on fully staged productions, but they were absolutely not going to do mainstream pieces, she says. No Agatha Christie. Nothing that would be on stage at the Alley. “We wanted to do something different, so we picked [English playwright and composer] Noël Coward. We said, ‘Let’s do Hay Fever,’ which we were so proud of,” she says with a laugh. “And ironically, it turns out University of St. Thomas had done it, like three months before that. We just didn’t know.”

The theater continued to grow, organically, year by year. But Udden wasn’t focused on staying power. “I never thought that far ahead,” she says. “I guess it was always, What’s the next season gonna be?”

When Main Street officially launched in 1975, it was a time of artistic growth for theater in Houston. The Alley was the big professional theater in the city, but there were community theaters, too, and city colleges with robust performing arts programming drawing in audiences from the immediate school community and the city at large. Within a few years of Main Street’s founding, Stages and the Ensemble launched as well. All are still part of the fabric of Houston theater.

Steve Garfinkel performed in the company’s first season and has since appeared in more than 65 of its plays (and directed over 20). Today, he credits Main Street Theater for some of the general growth in the city’s scene, thanks to its “work to expand audiences’ intellect, understanding, and sense of wonder have played a major role in growing Houston’s theater scene into the arts mecca it is today,” he wrote in an email. “While other theaters have strived to present the avant-garde or address particular issues, it is MST’s continued focus on producing plays of keenly honed literary value, thought-provoking themes, and just plain ol’ entertainment that have kept it a leading beacon of the city’s theater community.”

The theater’s early years at Autry House had a homegrown, can-do spirit. Taking refuge first in a room that doubled as a cafeteria and meeting space, actors and production members had to move tables and other furniture out of the way to set up for rehearsals and performances; then, when they were done, they had to break everything down again.

Udden gives credit to several early Main Street members, including Jacque Jones (née Jacque Perkowski) and Bill Burford, for their assistance and ideas to build the nascent theater. “[Jacque] had a real degree in theater and brought a lot of expertise. Bill also had a master’s. So people with real expertise saw what we were doing [and] were interested in the repertory.”

Even as Main Street expanded, its model proved unsustainable. Actors and production crew were paid a small stipend, but there wasn’t really cash for salaries. Sharing the Autry House space was challenging due to the constant setup and tear-down. Moving in lights and set pieces, only to move them out again, was taxing. The theater was mounting more than half a dozen readings and staged productions each year and needed a space of its own.

It was time for Main Street to move. It wouldn’t go far, though. In 1980, the company set up shop in Rice Village and began transforming a space on Times Boulevard that was once a warehouse for a dry cleaner. In the meantime, Main Street was still producing plays at Autry House. In 1981, with renovations on the Times Boulevard spot completed, the theater moved into its new home.

That’s about the same time that Udden realized it was time to step up as a leader.

From its inception, Main Street did a lot of its work through consensus and discussion. But as the theater built momentum, many of the original members had moved on to other, full-time jobs. “It became clear that if this was going to continue, somebody had to be in charge,” Udden says. Although her intention wasn’t to become an artistic director, that “somebody” was her.

In hindsight, it was the right move: Through the 1980s and ’90s, Main Street grew—not only in size, but also in stature. “It’s always been a really great little theater that has done work that nobody else was doing because Becky’s taste level’s so high,” says Joel Sandel, an actor who’s been performing with Main Street for 35 years. “She would branch out and try something that would seem like it was over our pay grade. I think the third or fourth show I did was Sweeney Todd, and we did it in the little Times space. It worked so well. It was a 10-week run that was selling out all the time. It was just one of the biggest, most successful things.”

Recalling the early days, Udden says the team had youth on their side. “We were all young. Some of us had gone to grad school, and we’d been introduced to a broad repertory of plays that weren’t part of the standard American canon,” she says. “We did Thornton Wilder. We did Samuel Beckett. We did some new plays, we did play readings. We did a lot of T. S. Eliot.”

By the time Main Street moved to the Rice Village location, it was known as a company with a repertoire of either new works or things that hadn’t been performed in the past decade, many with a literary bent. In the early 1980s, Main Street began producing matinee performances for children along with adult plays in the evenings.

By the mid-’90s, its children’s performances had grown so popular—several of the original company members fondly recall Hank the Cowdog, based on the popular children’s books—that those performances needed their own space as well. Under the umbrella of Main Street Theater for Youth, the company rented space in what was then Chelsea Market on Montrose Boulevard. The move was a game changer for the company, Udden says, helping the theater generate a steady income and employ more Houston actors. Main Street remained in the space until the mid-2010s; Chelsea Market was razed in 2019.

Today, Main Street Theater for Youth is housed at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH). It continues to be an employment driver, with every show performed by adult actors for an audience of enthusiastic kids, and a repertoire based on beloved children’s books like Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! or the Junie B. Jones series. 

As Udden steered her theater company through the decades, Main Street became a foundational place for Houston actors, something deeply important to her. Between the mainstage season and theater for youth performances, there were places for hometown actors to hone their craft. “Some of the best work I’ve done is in shows that weren’t even necessarily on my radar,” says Tamara Siler, an actor who’s performed with various companies and productions, including Main Street, Stages, and Paul Hope Cabarets. “But Becky and Andrew [Ruthven, Main Street’s associate artistic director and director of audience services] saw potential in me.”

Siler performed the role of Caroline in Main Street’s rendition of the musical Caroline, or Change, and she played Zetta in two different productions of Dog Act. “Working with Main Street was such an incredible experience, and a wonderful way to grow in ways I’d never expected,” she says.

The theater itself grew up, too. In 2014, Main Street launched a capital campaign to purchase and improve the Times Boulevard location. Theatergoers who walk into the lobby these days will notice that the two posts that once held up the theater’s ceiling are now part of the decor. Seating and staging can be customized to suit each production, without worrying about the sight lines around the posts.

Main Street has kept its commitment to contemporary voices and classic plays often overlooked. But it’s also dedicated to showcasing a broad range of voices, on and off the stage. “ I’ve always tried to offer a diverse repertory [and]…cast as diversely as we could,” says Udden. “But what we realized in 2020 was that just casting, just inviting actors to be in our white-led shows, written by white, Western-focused playwrights, really wasn’t being inclusive [or] promoting diversity.... Not only did we have to program different voices, but we had to bring different people in to direct them, to design them, to be in charge of them.”

The result has been noticeable. Over the past five years, there have been performances like the world premiere of Thomas Meloncon’s Stagolee and the Funeral of a Dangerous Word; 26 Miles by Quiara Alegría Hudes; and Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind—all written by playwrights of color with diverse casts and crews.

It’s one more example of how Main Street Theater looks forward, honoring its past. As the company celebrates its half-century milestone, Udden realizes it’s time to reflect on something she could barely contemplate when it all began: legacy. She’s working with the theater’s board on what will come next—and after her. At 74, she knows the curtain will come down on her reign at the theater eventually. Whenever she bows out, Udden is confident she’s created something of value. She’s in awe of all the people who helped build it.

“The thing I’m most proud of,” she says, “ is having been surrounded by people with ideas—crazy and great—and being able to say ‘yes’ to them when they propose a project.”