Off-Stage Left

In the "Wild West" of New Orleans theater, non-traditional works thrive in unexpected places

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Historically, New Orleans is a place rich in theatrics. But it is not, strictly speaking, a theater city. This is to say that the local theater scene is one that operates upon an infrastructure almost as fragile as the city’s own: cobbled together and highly susceptible to storms. But in this sinking swamp city, there is of course also a long legacy of open-mindedness, creativity, and innovation emerging from the discord—a place where flowers are planted in the potholes. 

Lacking the longstanding foundational support of major theater scenes like New York’s or Chicago’s, New Orleans has attracted a collective of theatermakers often interested in experimentation, in pushing boundaries. Operating outside the paradigm of traditional theater, several grassroots organizations have emerged on the scene, championed by artists driven by a need to explore, through the art of performance and storytelling, the things that impact their community the most: sense of place, social justice, complex histories, and looking toward the future. 

“The Wild West” of New Orleans’s Theater Scene

Over the course of the last twenty years since Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans theater scene has often been described as the “Wild West”. Facing the tumultuous cultural and infrastructural disruptions of devastating hurricanes, the pandemic, and a rapidly evolving media landscape—theater has become increasingly challenging to make and sustain. These broader challenges have resulted in a dearth of affordable venue spaces and public funding for the arts—forcing local theater companies to compete for the same precious few grants year after year, making it a struggle to survive for even the most-committed and best-supported companies 

Such challenges have led to the closure of several of the city’s most impactful theater organizations, including the circa-1986 Southern Repertory Theater—once considered a leading voice in regional theater—which closed its curtains in 2022 following years of struggles to find a stable venue and sustain itself financially. 

Almost a decade before that, one of the most supportive programs for local small theater in the city, New Orleans’s Fringe Festival, was forced to dissolve in 2014 (though there were various efforts to revive it, all unsuccessful) after continual struggles for funding and infrastructure. For years, the event had been an outlet for hundreds of local performances by small and emerging theater companies. 

Still, art prevails. Rather than totally extinguishing New Orleans’s theater scene, these challenges have fostered a surviving theater landscape built from determination and innovation, which has resulted in work that reinvents the model of theater in the modern age, reaching new audiences and inspiring experiment. 

“It's necessity that spawns that creativity. I think it gives us a way to expand how we want to produce and the kinds of stories we want to tell,” said Monica Harris, New Orleans-based theater artist and managing director of The NOLA Project. “You're just kind of deciding your own fate. You're the master of it, and you take the resources that are around you. One of the greatest resources in this city are people, and seeing what you can create together.” And the theater scene of New Orleans, she noted, attracts a different kind of artist, the kind with a particularly “experimental spirit”. 

Theater Outside of the Theater 

One of the biggest challenges to creating theater in New Orleans is the city’s lack of available and affordable traditional theater venues. Even the city’s older, more established companies, like The NOLA Project, which has been active for almost twenty years, does not have a consistent venue currently. As a result, the organization has produced works in an eclectic variety of spaces—from galleries and courtyards in the New Orleans African American Museum (where they staged The Colored Museum), to an old brake-tag station on the Lafitte Greenway (where they staged Dracula). 

According to Harris, the opportunity to bring theater into unexpected places has actually helped further The NOLA Project’s mission of making theater more accessible to the community. “We are a majority Black city with a lot of complex and rich cultural history,” she said. “And we want to be working with spaces who align with that in mind, where we can reflect the kind of audience base we want to reach and access people who may not be familiar with us at all, or who are not exposed to theater in their everyday lives. Bringing theater to different neighborhoods, I think, is a very direct way to make an immediate impact.” 

Other theater companies have found stages in the city’s historic churches. St. Rose of Lima Church on Bayou Road, for instance, was home to Southern Rep for a time, and now operates as The André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts & Cultural Justice (ACC)—a nonprofit dedicated to community development through the arts, with an emphasis on supporting Black artists, home to the theater group No Dream Deferred. 

Likewise, for many years the Tennessee Williams Theater Company of New Orleans staged Williams’s original works in a community church space and is now currently in-residence at The Marigny Opera House—a nonprofit venue in a deconsecrated historic church whose mission is devoted to providing a home for the arts, even (perhaps especially) those who lean toward experimentation. All manner of original music performances, ballet, burlesque, theater, and circus acts (and sometimes unexpected combinations of these artforms) have been produced at The Marigny Opera House. 

And, in true New Orleans fashion, theater finds its way into bars, as well. AllWays Lounge & Cabaret on St. Claude Avenue is perhaps the most prolific example of bars-as-theater, hosting all manner of burlesque, cabaret, and left-of-center theater out of its main lounge area as well as from The Twilight Room space in the back. “We have everything from traditionally trained thespians to self-taught singers, actors, dancers, comedians, musicians, and sideshow artists,” said Zalia BeVille, owner and booking agent of The AllWays. “Depending on the way that they wish to present themselves at any moment, they can take their visions from the realm of traditional to experimental… But we tend to nurture and encourage pushing boundaries and looking deeper.” 

Among the recent lineup at The AllWays are an original dark musical comedy led by a drag queen; a psychological horror show tying in sideshow, burlesque, and live music; and The Van Ella Bordella—which weaves burlesque with scripted theater, improvisation, comedy, musical theater, and historical trivia with sex worker education and advocacy. “After 250 shows, I'd say it's been well received by the city,” BeVille said. “One thing I notice about New Orleans is that we tend to push boundaries by leaning towards the raunchy, sensuous, sultry, queer nature of our southern swampy environ.”

While innovative theater pops up in atypical venues across the city, some dedicated, if offbeat, spaces for theater have emerged to respond to the need. “Creative spaces are incredibly important. They are such a major cornerstone of our culture,” BeVille said. “Many times overlooked by the mainstream, these spaces along with the performers and works that emerge from them, create commentary and beauty along with a dialogue for politics, religion, struggle, and celebration… It would be a very gray world without them.”

"It's necessity that spawns that creativity. I think it gives us a way to expand how we want to produce and the kinds of stories we want to tell." 

—Monica Harris, managing director of The NOLA Project

One example of this sort of venue is The Actor’s Apothecary on Prytania in the Lower Garden District, which was born from a desire to rekindle the local acting community after the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to offering various taping, editing, and marketing services for actors, as well as classes, the space also hosts staged readings, improv shows, and plays in a black box theater setting. 

Across town in a 4,000-square foot Marigny warehouse space, Catapult is dedicated to the development of original performances, offering rehearsal space as well as a design studio, which allows design elements to be incorporated into the rehearsal process. Founded in 2012 by Jeff Becker and Lisa Shattuck with a collective of performance companies, including Mondo Bizarro, Artspot Productions, and (now defunct) New Noise—Catapult is used by several local ensembles, including Mondo Bizarro, Goat in the Road and Another Gulf is Possible, as a shared resource. 

Another center for theatrical gathering is Big Couch, which operates out of a former department store space in the Marigny and hosts improv shows and classes, as well as a wide variety of performances and readings, many of which lean avant-garde. Small, innovative companies like Fat Squirrel—which has produced shows ranging from Shakespeare to absurdist takes on Medieval morality plays—find a home at Big Couch. 

Fourth Wall Be Damned

One stand-out approach to theater that is especially responsive to the challenges of finding a home in traditional venues is that of the site-specific, immersive play. Intramural Theater, originally founded by A.S. Wilson and Bennett Kirschner in 2015 as the Cobbleslop Group, emphasizes “physical and spatial experiments with original scripts” and incorporates various elements of live music, visual arts, and movement into works designed with a particular nontraditional space in mind. 

Five of Intramural’s works have been generated from Kirschner’s devising method, which combines improvisation with free-writing exercises within a non-hierarchical ensemble. The company’s most recent production, staged in May of 2024 at the Music Box Village Schoolhouse, was an original work titled The Bermuda Can Company—which satirically imagines a New Orleans startup creating the first fully resealable can, before descending into chaos when the prototype is discovered missing. 

Another more established theater group working in this space is Goat in the Road Productions, helmed by co-artistic directors Shannon Flaherty and Christopher Kaminstein. Goat in the Road’s plays often begin with research into lesser-told areas of local history with particular resonance today, inspired by real historic spaces. One well-received example was The Family Line, an original immersive play staged in the back rooms and courtyard of the historic BK House in the French Quarter. Centered around the 1892 New Orleans General Strike, and on the Black and Sicilian workers who came together across racial lines in solidarity for better working conditions, the play invited audience members to meander through different rooms and areas, following whichever actors they chose or remaining in one area as the action unfolded. 

“I would say overall, we're trying to look for ways to present theater that's maybe just outside of the traditional theater-going experience. And I love the traditional theater-going experience. But I'm also aware that fewer and fewer people are going to traditional shows across the nation right now,” Kaminstein said. “I think that experiential element is partly what audiences are looking for. They're looking for something to go to that really takes them out of their life and is different from something they've seen before. Which I think is the challenge we have as theater makers right now.” 

Taking the approach of inserting theater into real-world spaces one step further, Goat in the Road’s Play/Write program brings theater and playwriting classes to hundreds of New Orleans public school students each year, culminating in showcases of student-written works. “And so the educational work and the original work have been leaning on each other from the beginning,” said Kaminstein. “And I think that's important to say, because I think there can be a tendency in theater and experimental theater to be a little bit navel gazey. And our goal from the beginning was like, ‘how can we do something that really responds, and it's in the community, as well?’” 

[Read this story on Goat in the Road's production of The Family Line from our November 2022 issue.]

The program, hand-in-hand with the touring show Goat in the Schools—which brings student-written plays to local school libraries, gymnasiums, and cafeterias—allows young people the opportunity to see their own writing come to life on stage. Kaminstein points out that the student-written works are some of the most “experimental” of anything GitR produces. “It’s the most trippy, surreal, interesting, bizarre—it's like, very experimental what these students are doing with their work,” he said. 

The next project coming from GitR, to be released September 29, is a theatrical, immersive audio guide through the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi—created with support from the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and the National Endowment for the Arts. The company is also staging an original work called Carlota, whose title character is based on a character from their 2018 play, The Stranger Disease. A musical, Carlota is an intergenerational story about a Cuban immigrant who returns to Cuba and joins the Revolution, and is scheduled to premiere in the spring of 2026. 

A New Look at Old Stories

The perspective shift that takes place when theater’s conventions become re-ordered often results in exciting original work, but can also generate re-examinations of canon. In 2023 for instance, The NOLA Project produced Shakespeare's Tempest, Reimagined, directed and adapted by founding member James Bartelle. Staged on Lafitte Greenway, the eleven actors making up the cast (including Harris as Prospero) all remained “on stage” for the entire performance, observing the action and contributing sound effects and song. Leslie Claverie, who played Ariel, led the cast in singing the original music, written by Alexis Marceaux and Stephen MacDonald of Sweet Crude. 

Another experimental take on the bard’s work premiered at this year’s New Orleans Shakespeare Festival—which presented its high-concept multimedia, “very psychological” version of Julius Caesar in the black box space of Tulane’s Lupin Theater, under Salvatore Mannino’s direction. “It was just a completely different kind of sensory experience of Shakespeare, that I had not done before, as was The Tempest, even though both directors took completely different takes,” said Harris, who, in addition to her work with The NOLA Project, played Calpurnia in Julius Caesar. 

New Voices Take the Stage

One of the more recent companies to arrive on the New Orleans theater scene is the female-driven company, The Fire Weeds, who produced their inaugural production at Big Couch as part of the 2023 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival. Earlier this year, co-founders and theater/filmmakers as well as actresses Jaclyn Bethany and Lin Gathright produced two of Williams’s more obscure and female-focused one-acts, The Pretty Trap and Interior Panic, under a joint bill they titled “Outraged Hearts”. Each play is an early iteration of one of Williams’ most-produced and most-famous plays—The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, respectively. The Fire Weeds’ production reimagines them from the points of view of of the troubled protagonists Laura and Blanche. 

 “These ideas of female desire or repression, or sexuality, or mental health, it's all actually a very interesting and positive and collaborative exploration of these themes in a modern context,” said Bethany. She and Gathright were intrigued with the ways these infrequently-staged scripts recenter women in a way that is hopeful, offering among other things a new perspective on Williams and his work. “We didn't want to play it safe.

The thing that sort of kept us going was if we were going to do these things that are in the cultural zeitgeist, we needed to take risks and really push them and push ourselves as artists.” 

While The Pretty Trap was staged in Big Couch’s theater space, Interior Panic was put up in the venue’s second room—which isn’t set up as a traditional theater venue at all, but better lent itself to the dingy world of Stella’s apartment. The exterior door through which actors would enter and exit was actually on Desire Street, with characters already within the world of the play coming and going as part of the pre-show. 

The Fire Weeds’ next production will be Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, staged at Big Couch from December 4–21, 2024. Especially given the play’s original context of the political upheaval of post-election 1960s, Bethany believes Albee’s work has the potential to be particularly resonant. While this script is less obscure than their previous offerings, The Fire Weeds still intend to approach it in their own way, with women at the center. “We're really interested in examining it from the female perspective, and it's also one of the greatest plays of all time,” Bethany said. 

“Creating meaning together to experience some cultural event, I think that's just built into the New Orleans culture. That is one of the things that makes it possible to have such a broad range of theater in this city.”  —Lisa Shattuck

Over in the Tremé, one of the city’s oldest theater companies has been producing innovative theater works since 1980. Operating under the longstanding mission to uplift the voices of BIPOC  (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) creatives while addressing matters that impact the Black community, Junebug Productions was founded by John O’Neal in 1980 as the successor of the Free Southern Theater, which was itself founded in 1963 as a cultural extension of the Civil Rights Movement. One of Junebug’s most impactful performances to-date was 2011’s The Homecoming Project, which told the story of Black New Orleanians in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The performance was presented in the style of a second line, emphasizing the ways in which New Orleans’s own cultural traditions are inherently theatrical. More recently, the Junebug Juke Joint series has brought an immersive theatrical experience of R&B music history into various venues, from the Contemporary Arts Center to the recently-restored Dew Drop Inn. 

A younger company with similar missions of celebrating Black leaders in the arts and telling stories rooted in place is No Dream Deferred. The concept came from a conversation between ​​Lauren E. Turner Hines, Keah Moffett, Yolanda Williams, and India Mack about the need to create “a space where Black theater makers in particular, and BIPOC theater makers generally speaking, had more autonomy and agency around the art they were making and how it was being made,” said Turner Hines, founding producing artistic director of No Dream Deferred. 

Since its founding, No Dream Deferred’s mission has expanded to include the development of new plays by Black Southern playwrights. This work has manifested as the We Will Dream: New Works Festival, launched in 2023 as a biennial event that licenses and produces never-before-premiered works by emerging Black Southern writers. “You could be a playwright and call yourself a playwright because you write plays, but you may die or leave the profession never having seen any of your work on stage ever,” said Turner Hines. “Those odds, when it comes to Black playwrights—it shrinks to a minute amount. We wanted to change that dynamic.”

Besides producing new works and doing so with teams of primarily professional Black actors and designers, the shows No Dream Deferred aims to produce are deeply connected to the shared experiences of New Orleans audiences. “I think that the arts at large, or performing arts, should always be seeking to serve as an asset to the shared vision for any community that it's in, because that's really how you cultivate investment in what it is you're doing,” Turner Hines said. “So New Orleanians come to see our work, they see themselves. They see a message that's relevant to them. And so, we really focus on cultural relevance in our work.” 

[Read this story about New Orleans's role as the Jazz Capital of the World, from the past to now, here.] 

The impact of working from the Black-led cultural institution that is the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts & Culture Justice (formerly the St. Rose of Lima Church) on a historically Black culture, arts, and entrepreneurship corridor in the 7th Ward is not lost on Turner Hines and collaborators. “We’re just really embracing and soaking up the abundance of that history, that legacy, and the narrative of what that means, and figuring out how we keep it moving forward in a way that feels right for us,” Turner Hines said. No Dream Deferred is currently looking ahead not only to its 2025 We Will Dream: New Works Festival in the spring but has been invited to the 2025 International Black Theater Summit in Ghana to strategize regarding the festival’s future. 

Working with collaborator Lisa Shattuck—whose passion for original works rooted in place overlap with No Dreams Deferred’s—the company is in the process of developing a unique new work, Wonder Wander City Park, launching in April of 2025 as part of the We Will Dream: New Works Festival. The “immersive audio experience” will take audiences through New Orleans City Park, unpacking the complex, multi-layered history of the land that’s enjoyed as a public space today. “It's a way for people to uncover or have a deeper awareness about how all of our histories culminate to create our experience now,” Turner Hines said. “So, it covers everything from when City Park was segregated, to the Native history, to all of the experiences of City Park, through storytelling.”

Wonder Wander City Park comes as an evolution of a 2023 production Shattuck and her husband Jeff Becker co-produced with Mondo Bizarro titled Wonder Wander Future Date. Audience members listened through headphones as they “went on a date” with actors who spoke to them live, allowing them to engage in conversation. The kicker? The actors were playing New Orleanians from hundreds of years in the future. “And they're asking the audience, ‘what does it look like here, where you're standing?’ and you come to realize that where they are, a few hundred years later, New Orleans is underwater,” Shattuck explained. 

For Wonder Wander City Park, the audience will be talking with someone from the past. “You're gonna be entertained, and you're gonna have fun, but also, you may have some realizations or learn something that you weren't aware of, and like, how does that affect you?” Shattuck said, “So I really think creating meaning with a group of people while you're experiencing a cultural event is the goal.”

Reflecting on New Orleans's theater landscape as a whole, Shattuck pointed out that this tendency toward nontraditional, original theater events is an inherent aspect of New Orleans culture. “I mean, New Orleans’s tradition of community-based participatory stuff like parades and second lines, burlesque, Super Sunday, and all this stuff—that supports the theater culture here, and supports [the theory] that you don't have to do traditional pre-scripted theater if you don't want to,” she said. “Creating meaning together to experience some cultural event, I think that's just built into the New Orleans culture. That is one of the things that makes it possible to have such a broad range of theater in this city.”