Many theater companies routinely take on new leadership — a new artistic director here, a change in management there. One Atlanta theater group is turning over completely.
The Weird Sisters Theatre Project has announced that they have brought on five new producers to replace the original co-founders of the group.
Speaking with producer Myke Johns, founding member Tiffany Porter explains that the Weird Sisters was originally an informal group of theater artists.
“It wasn’t a thing in the beginning,” Porter explains. “It was friends wanting to perform together. And in this town at that time, there weren’t a lot of opportunities, so we decided to create our own opportunities.”
Opportunities, that is, for women to perform together and to be at the helm of their own work. And so the core group of five women informally banded together in 2012 to work on their own projects out of the Shakespeare Tavern. They’ve premiered new work by playwright Lauren Gunderson, and commissioned the play “Hot Pink” by Johnny Drago.
“One of the major goals was to employ as many women as possible into power positions,” co-founder Veronica Duerr told WABE in 2013. “Meaning that the producers are females, the directors are females, we try to do plays written by females. And it’s funny because it happens just about every 20 years, they go ‘Hey! Women aren’t getting a whole lot of work. We should do something about this.’”
But after five years of “doing something about it,” Porter explains that many of the founding members have advanced in their careers — most of them in professional theater. Some have moved out of state, and rather than just dissolving the project altogether, the five founders of the Weird Sisters are turning over control to five new women.
“Essentially, we’ve created a nonprofit organization, a theater company and a brand that we’re very very proud of,” Porter says. “And just because we may not have the time to do it all together at the same time, we haven’t lost the passion for it, but we wanted to make sure our mission statement is what we do, which is create opportunities for women in this field. “
The women stepping into the producers roles are Kate Donadio MacQueen, Rebekah Suellau, Rachel Frawley, Julie Skrzypek and Shelli Delgado.
Donadio MacQueen and Frawley are actors, as is Delgado — audiences may recognize her from her recent performance in Serenbe Playhouse’s “Miss Saigon.” Suellau is a playwright who recently spent a year working with the Seedling Project, another collective of DIY theatre artists. Skrzypek is currently on a world tour with a new dance piece by Pharrell Williams, and is a director and stage manager in Atlanta.
So the new Sisters aren’t really new to the Atlanta theater scene. In conversation about why they’re eager to continue the hard work of producing theater, the word “community” kept coming up.
“I’ll always be an actor,” Donadio MacQueen says, “but how can I contribute to my community more palpably? How can my voice have a more direct impact on our community?”
Frawley has previously worked with The Weird Sisters as a performer, so she has both an inside and outside perspective on the project’s place in Atlanta theater.
“Weird Sisters is a place where you will be listened to with respect and your ideas will be taken seriously,” Frawley says. “And there is no level of new-ness that is discounted or dismissed. And so I think that’s a very nurturing environment to come into as an artists, who maybe hasn’t had a platform for ideas before.”
“Weird Sisters is a place that will welcome new ideas” she says.
So with the five new producers now working on their first season together, Atlanta will soon get to see what new ideas the Weird Sisters can conjure up.
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