I am thrilled to be here to celebrate 50 years of the Alliance Theatre and the grand opening of a beautiful renovated space.
When our theatre movement began in the 1940s-60s, Margo Jones, one of our founding mothers, dreamed of a day when there would be 40 resident theaters across the United States. At the time, professional theatre was a commercial venture mostly limited to New York. Those early founders fought to decentralize our artform in the radical belief that the arts belonged to everyone. Today, our field includes over 1000 non profit professional theatres reaching an estimated 44 million audience members annually and employing 147,000 theatre professionals. Since its founding in 1968, the Alliance Theatre has been a central part of that movement, and a beacon for all of us in modeling the best of our values.
Because, while our theatre movement gathered steam at the same time as the civil rights movement, too often the arts sector has reflected the inequities of our broader culture. Yet time and time again, the Alliance has called out to our better selves and led by example, garnering national attention along the way--not just for outstanding artistry but for institutional leadership. Here are a few examples:
- In the mid 1980s, the Alliance became one of the first members of LORT with women in both top positions. Timothy Near was interim artistic director, with the late great Edith Love as Managing Director.
- Kenny Leon became one of the first African-American artistic directors in regional theatre when he was appointed at the Alliance in 1990.
- Then, Susan V. Booth came in and fiercely championed equity, diversity and inclusion in the arts. Under her leadership, the Alliance has received a prestigious BOLD grant for advancing Women in Leadership; and the Alliance instituted the Spelman Fellowship, a pioneering program that creates a pipeline for women of color in artistic leadership.
- The Alliance’s Education Department is leading the field in so many ways including in programs that engage our youngest audiences – making the Alliance the only major theater to produce work for all ages. And I do mean all ages: the Kathy and Ken Bernhardt Theatre for the Very Young serves children age zero to 18 months!
- And, during the renovation, the Alliance did something no other theatre of its size in the US has done before – took an entire season of 12 full productions on the road to venues around Metro Atlanta. They’ve never lost that radical belief that theatre really does belong to all of us.
At TCG, we’ve been blessed to have Alliance leaders like Susan, Kenny, Max Leventhal, and Reade Fahs serve on our board or our National Council for the American Theatre. In the process, we’ve gotten a small taste of the warmth and wisdom that has helped the Alliance thrive. And I can say, personally, that throughout my career, I have looked to the Alliance as a source of inspiration. And, I had the good fortune of working with Susan Booth as TCG board chair during my first two years as exec director of TCG. As you all know, working with Susan comes with joy, intellectual stimulation and passionate curiosity about what else is possible through theatre.
So, in the end, we’re not just celebrating the bricks and mortar of a newly renovated space but the soul that resides within. More than anything, that’s how you know when you’ve walked into a real theatre. You feel the soul of the place, and because we’re theatre people, it’s a collaborative soul. It holds the founders who began this dream, the leaders who grew it, the artists and audiences who breathe life into it right now, and new generations who will call this place home 50 years from now. The Alliance has such soul, and I’m so grateful to celebrate it with you tonight. And now, it is my pleasure to introduce a song adapted especially for tonight by EVER AFTER’s brilliant lyricist and composer, Marcy Heisler and Zina Goldrich. You’ll hear their song, “Is There Anything Leonardo Can’t Do?” during the show later this evening…but for now, enjoy Marcy and Zina’s original song, “Is There Anything THE ALLIANCE Can’t Do?”
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