On Wednesday, January 22, our group had the opportunity to visit Arena Stage, a nonprofit regional theater celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2020. The performance company reaches an annual audience of around 300,000 people and focuses on producing work that is accessible, meaningful to the local community in Washington D.C., and rooted in justice and social change. Arena Stage, located in the Southwest neighborhood of the district on the Potomac River, began producing and performing theatrical work in 1950 and has since grown to fill a large theater complex called the Mead Center for American Theater since a renovation in 2010. The complex houses three stages of varying audience capacities and purposes, such as the Kogod Cradle, seating 200 people, that is specifically intended for performances of new work. The Artistic Director, Molly Smith, and the Executive Director, Edgar Dobie, of Arena Stage work to fulfill the organization’s mission and vision statements that guide the programming of the company.
Mission of Arena Stage
Arena Stage is the voice of American theater resident in our nation’s capital. Focused on American artists, our productions are innovative and representative of stories from across the country. We nurture new plays and reimagine classics. We celebrate our democracy and diversity through a multitude of voices in our productions and community engagement programs to inspire people to action. We produce all that is passionate, exuberant, profound, entertaining, deep and dangerous in the American spirit.
Vision of Arena Stage
Arena Stage’s vision is to galvanize the transformative power of theater to understand who we are as Americans.
Becca Campana displaying Arena Stage’s Tony Awards
Arena Stage is the largest theater company in the country dedicated to American plays and playwrights, intentionally commissioning and developing new plays through the American Voices New Play Institute. In 1976, Arena Stage won a special Tony Award for theatrical excellence as a regional theater, the first regional theater outside of New York City to win the award, solidifying the company’s reputation as a premier theater known for producing meaningful programming. Arena Stage puts community engagement at the heart of its programming and performances, creating and producing programs that combine social justice, political dialogue, and interpersonal connection such as Voices of Now, devised theater ensembles that develop collaboratively written autobiographical plays, D.C. Ticket Partnership, affordable ticketing and opportunities for further engagement with theater through learning materials and direct work with teaching artists for D.C. school children, and Arena Civil Dialogues, a discussion-based program creating conversation on current social and political issues.
When our group visited Arena Stage, we met with Becca Campana, the school programs manager in the community engagement department at Arena Stage who runs the D.C. Ticket Partnership program and is a director of the Voices of Now program. Becca, who has been with Arena Stage for sixteen years, directs two or more of the ten Voices of Now ensembles each season, including the Advocacy Ensemble, a group comprised of university and pre-professional artists creating devised autobiographical theatrical works with the intention of generating discussion on positive community change, and the Grief Ensemble, working in tandem with the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing, to engage with teenagers and explore telling their stories of loss to find healing. Additionally, Becca has traveled the world with Arena Stage and the Voices of Now program in conjunction with the U.S. Department of State to create devised theater with ensembles around the globe.
Our meeting with Becca was much more than a typical Q&A discussion. After showing us around Arena Stage, Becca brought us to a classroom space, where she led us in a variety of engagement and community-building activities to give us a taste of the work that she does with the Voices of Now program. Throughout our time together, Becca had us share reflections on our time in D.C., our opinions on the purpose and effect of art, and our personal life experiences with issues of equity and justice. Becca pushed how the Voices of Now program is intentionally ensemble-based, placing trust-building within the group as a cornerstone of the work that is produced. I found this emphasis on creating community through artistic practice to be especially significant to our experiences and learning that have happened in Washington D.C. this month. Our meeting with Becca and the experience that our group shared at Arena Stage highlighted and illustrated how art is meant to be a community practice that binds and strengthens groups. If art can be used as a medium to connect people of vastly different life experiences, art can also be a tool for bridging the gaps that divide us politically. In this turbulent time of a volatile political climate of debate and hate, it is significant to look at how art can be utilized to unite our nation’s differences. This topic was significant in the performance of A Thousand Splendid Suns that we had the opportunity to see at Arena Stage later that evening. Check out Jimena’s blog post about this touching performance!