Broadway Bound

A first-ever festival of new plays will shine a spotlight on local theatre artists.

Home-grown theatre is finally coming back to downtown Tacoma.

Actually, that’s an exaggeration. Indigenous theatre never really left. Every second Monday for the past year and a half, Northwest Playwrights Alliance, a group that materialized roughly four years ago in Olympia and lately had ties to the defunct Tacoma Actors Guild, has held play readings in the Broadway Center Rehearsal Studio.

Plays read at these gatherings are strictly Northwest — that is, written by someone from or currently living on the plane that stretches from Wyoming to Washington and between Oregon and Alaska. Each reading is led by a director and cast with actors, all from this region.

The cast reads from scripts on music stands. One NPA member likens the experience to listening to a radio play. And despite perennial hand wringing by “experts” over declining theatre attendance, audiences for NPA readings are growing.

NPA is the byproduct of an old friendship. Playwright Bryan Willis and actor-director Brian Tyrell have maintained a connection ever since they met as student and teacher in Olympia. They went their separate ways to study and work in theatres across the country. After reuniting serendipitously years ago in Olympia, they concluded there wasn’t enough new work being done anywhere in the Northwest. Willis and Tyrell decided to use their connections and know-how to do something about it.

“It was sort of a cabaret thing we were doing every month in Olympia,” recalls Tyrell, NPA artistic director. “Initially we held readings in the side room of a restaurant. But we quickly outgrew the space.” In 2006, NPA hooked up with Tacoma Actors Guild. Tyrell became the theatre’s casting director and Willis was playwright-in-residence. That’s when Tacoma became their home base.

TAG didn’t survive long enough to host more than a few readings, but NPA soldiered on. “We made a commitment to a lot of playwrights,” says Willis. NPA sustained its connection with the Broadway Center forged through TAG; the idea was to continue the play readings in the space NPA’s audiences were familiar with. Willis began making new friends in order to keep the organization afloat.

NPA started small and will probably stay that way. “I want to do new and interesting projects,” says Willis. “That’s not something a lot of people are going to throw money at. The danger in building a theatre is many years into it, you can find yourself with a million-dollar budget and doing work you have no interest in.”

University of Puget Sound supported NPA’s first Double Shot Theatre Festival of short works in May 2007, providing performance space and — more importantly — an extended community of motivated artists who shared NPA’s mission to shed light on local talent. “It really takes a village to pull these things off,” says Tyrell. “You might have one person who leads the way. But you have to surround yourself with like-minded people who can help you in whatever capacity you need.”

Tyrell points to Erik Handberg, who founded the Horatio Theatre, a professional company in Tacoma, that’s still without a permanent home or a regular season schedule. “I think he has probably discovered how hard this is to pull off alone.”

That’s why NPA is — and will likely remain — an all-volunteer organization. Organization: not theatre. Without a wealthy individual or corporate sponsor footing the bill, finding a home for new work is more than a challenge. It’s difficult beyond reason, some might say. “The stock market is for wimps,” jokes Willis. “I’m producing new theatre in Washington State — name a bigger thrill than that!”

“I don’t see any organization that’s as committed to achieving their goal as NPA,” says Tacoma playwright Brent Hartinger. “They’re producing new work — what an extraordinary thing that is. Every city has a theatre that’s doing the ten thousandth production of A Christmas Carol. But what really determines whether or not a city has a vibrant arts scene is whether new work is being done with local talent.”

In February, over two weekends (February 21 – 24 and February 27 – March 2), NPA, again in partnership with UPS, is producing the Festival of Northwest Plays at the Theatre on the Square. More than thirty plays will be presented over six days, including three fully produced, full-length works (by Tacomans Hartinger and C. Rosalind Bell and Dano Madden, from Boise) — easily the most ambitious made-in-Tacoma theatre at Broadway Center since TAG closed. In addition to showcasing more than one hundred Northwest theatre artists, the festival is a test of where NPA will — and will be able to afford to — go next.

“We’re in kind of an odd position,” explains Willis. “It’s difficult to get people to contribute to a ‘support organization.’ Donors want to see what you’re producing. But it’s so expensive to produce theatre. We don’t want to get ourselves into the financial position that TAG or Seattle’s Empty Space found themselves in. We’re really trying to develop a home for regional playwrights. Because, unfortunately, that doesn’t exist in the Northwest. On the other hand, I don’t want to lose ten thousand dollars. But if we have the audiences we enjoyed for Double Shot, we’ll be in really good shape.”

Willis is seeking grants to defray costs of mounting the festival and is putting his own money into the enterprise. In addition to UPS, Northwest Playwrights Alliance has lined up support from Seattle University, Western Washington University and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to cosponsor planned tours, forums and festivals across the region this year.

“Our number-one mission is to provide an opportunity for new works to be heard and seen,” says Tyrell. “This festival is a step above that. When it’s all over, we’ll stand back and ask ourselves, ‘Was it worth it?’ And we’ll see.”  ‹

Illustration by Jeremy Gregory