University of Dallas News

Issue date: 4/21/09 Section: News

Judith and Patrick Kelly are pictured here with the medals they received for 20, 30, and 40 years of service to the University and their medals for the King Fellow award. Photo by Carolyn Brown

On Saturday, April 25, Professors Judith French and Patrick Kelly will commemorate their retirement after more than 40 years teaching in the University of Dallas Drama Department with a retirement party. Judith Kelly retired at the end of the spring 2008 semester, and Patrick Kelly will join her at the end of this semester, stepping down from his current post as drama department chair.

Judith Kelly graduated from UD in 1963 with a degree in English. She is a specialist in dramatic literature and one of Dr. Louise Cowan's first students. In 1966, after completing a master's degree at Marquette University, she was asked to return to UD to serve as the first chair of the drama department and help start the University Theatre. Patrick Kelly drew this distinction between the two tasks: the drama department is an academic department and the University Theatre a producing organization.

In 1967, her husband joined her working at UD as a teacher, director and designer of courses. Patrick Kelly has a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and an MFA from Southern Methodist University. The Kellys together have been heads of the drama department and involved in the University Theatre since they arrived in 1966 and 1967. "The founding and establishing of the drama department and the University Theatre here is certainly the greatest single effort that I've made and that of which I am most proud," said Mr. Kelly.

The Kellys, in collaboration with architect Duane Landry, designed the Margaret Jonsson Theater, which opened in 1972. The building had previously been used as a cafeteria, and the drama department had been operating out of Lynch Auditorium. "The drama department needed something a little more presentable," said Patrick Kelly. "What we were given the job of doing was reconfiguring the building into a theater performing space and a shop and offices."

"What we did was describe the kind of plays we wanted to do, which are basically the great works, and the kind of physical theater that such plays require. That would be [a theater] that reflected what Shakespeare's theater physically was like, and what the Greeks' theater physically was like, so an open stage was indicated and 80 seats arranged carefully around that stage."

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