Alumni Spotlight: Parker Davis Gray

Parker Davis Gray (B.F.A. ’16) is this week’s featured alum in our new Alumni Spotlight series for the This Week at Meadows e-newsletter. Each week, a different Meadows alum will be highlighted for their accomplishments post-graduation.

When Parker Davis Gray arrived at Meadows, his goal was clear: become a professional actor. A decade after earning his B.F.A. from the Division of Theatre, acting remains an important part of his career, but his work has expanded in ways he never anticipated. Today, Gray is also a playwright, producer and executive director of Dallas’ Second Thought Theatre, having built a multifaceted career by remaining open to where his interests and opportunities lead.

Gray credits his Meadows training with giving him both the foundation to pursue a professional career and the freedom to discover what kind of artist he wanted to become. Among the lessons that has stayed with him most is what he calls the “Gift of Play,” a mindset he continues to bring into his work today.

“The faculty in the Division of Theatre instilled in us the importance of playful experimentation and cultivated an environment where we could risk, fail, and risk again without the stakes of consequence,” explains Gray. “Meadows shaped me into a team player with deep respect for the work, but without losing the sense of play and fun, and I have carried that into every audition and rehearsal room since.”

Gray began rehearsals for his first professional production just one week after graduating and has worked steadily in the Dallas theatre community ever since. Alongside acting professionally, he spent three years as operations manager and casting director at Undermain Theatre before leaving in 2019 to pursue acting full time. When the pandemic disrupted that plan, Gray found himself reconsidering what his career could look like.

An opportunity eventually arose at Second Thought Theatre, a theatre company he had long admired as a patron. Though he hadn’t anticipated returning to nonprofit theatre management so soon, the chance to help guide one of his favorite Dallas theatres was too compelling to pass up. Now in his fourth season as executive director, Gray runs Second Thought alongside fellow Mustang Carson McCain.

“I left SMU not only a better actor with incredible training and an understanding of what art I wanted to make, but with the tools to make it happen,” Gray says of his Meadows experience. “I feel like I left with dreams and goals of what career I wanted, and if those goals ever changed or if I encountered an obstacle that postponed those goals, I knew how to pivot and adapt without compromising my ambitions.”

That willingness to follow an evolving artistic path has also led Gray somewhere else he never expected: playwriting. After the loss of his father in 2017 and the upheaval of the pandemic just a few years later, Gray felt an increasing need to write as he processed his experiences and the world around him. What began as a creative necessity grew into another dimension of his professional life. He has now written 10 plays and seen his work professionally produced.

Throughout his professional journey, Gray has returned to a piece of advice he received from Meadows professor Michael Connolly: “Follow the work.” Over the years, the phrase has taken on new meanings, but one of the most important has been the realization that the work itself can change as an artist changes.

For Gray, following the work has meant allowing his ambitions to evolve rather than limiting them to the career he first imagined for himself. Ten years after leaving Meadows, the result is not one path through the theatre world, but a career that continues to grow alongside the artist himself.