Quark Theatre's motto is "Small Plays about Big Ideas." (Photo courtesy Quark Theatre)
Theatre Memphis’ recent production of The Drowsy Chaperone was really something to see, if you were lucky enough to get a ticket — a massive, glittering, Broadway-style spectacular stuffed inside a set built to look like an unremarkable apartment. Chaperone is a miraculous meta-musical about a curmudgeonly man who hates theater but loves his ancient collection of original Broadway cast recordings.
It gave the city’s oldest playhouse an opportunity to do all the things it does best: Surprise, dazzle, overwhelm, and defy all expectations for what we envision when we think about community theater. It’s hard to sit in the comfortable, almost luxurious 400-seat Lohrey Auditorium, watching that wide, gorgeously lit stage fill up with singers, dancers, musicians, and amazing scenery, and imagine that a place like Theatre Memphis could possibly have its roots in something called the “Little Theatre Movement.”
New Moon is well on its way to becoming one of Memphis' next institutions. Here, a scene from Buried Child. (Photo courtesy New Moon Theatre Company)
But that’s where the city’s namesake venue comes from. And even though TM’s role in the community has evolved well beyond its roots, the spirit of that original movement lives on today in Memphis’ active, ambitious, independent theater scene. Today’s indie companies stage original, new, and experimental work alongside a healthy mix of dance and classics of the world stage.
The Little Theatre Movement began in the early 1900s as cinema began to mimic popular stage melodramas and threaten a controlling theatrical syndicate that booked talent and touring shows. New acting and playwriting styles were emerging, both naturalistic and experimental, and these new kinds of performances were better suited for intimate encounters. To accommodate and to keep live performance vital in America, tiny theaters cropped up across the country. Memphis joined the movement in earnest in 1925 when a five-year-old drama club moved into its first permanent home — a stable in Victorian Village. Four years later, the Memphis Little Theatre, as Theatre Memphis was then called, moved into the former swimming pool area at the Memphis Pink Palace Museum, where it produced popular plays and musicals for almost half a century, before growing into its current and considerably larger East Memphis home in 1975.
Theatre Memphis became the first institution of its kind in the modern philanthropic era. It has become a regional institution with two performance spaces and a reputation for extravagant costumes and scenography. As Theatre Memphis, Playhouse on the Square, Hattiloo Theater, and Germantown Community Theatre have all grown from tiny, peripatetic companies into larger and more commercial institutions with their own distinctive buildings, new companies have formed to develop original scripts and produce quality work that might otherwise fall through the cracks.
Unlike the institutions, however, most of our smaller companies rent shared spaces or produce in non-traditional venues. That can make forging a public identity difficult, and it can be tough for the casual theatergoer to keep track of who’s who and what’s what in the indie theater world without a scorecard. But if you know where to look, Memphis’ little theater companies offer tremendous opportunities for audiences, volunteers, and artists looking for community and a chance to expand horizons, grow, develop, work, and watch just outside the mainstream.
Although they are one of Memphis’ newest companies, few organizations represent the tiny but mighty ethos of Memphis’ indie companies like Quark Theatre, which produces only two to three shows per season. Quark — named for the subatomic particle — was founded by veteran actor Adam Remsen with Tony Isbell, a Eugart Yerian honoree for lifetime achievement in Memphis theater. That’s the kind of clout that attracts top talent to lesser known, but often extraordinary material, which is great news for more adventurous audiences. Quark’s motto is “Small Plays about Big Ideas,” and with stark, risky thrillers like Blackbird (an Olivier Award-winner) and The Nether to their credit, this young company is living up to its promises. Remsen and Isbell have a knack for choosing tough, timely material and the company has performed in various shop fronts and alternative theater spaces all over town.
Femmemphis Collective produces thoughtful, complex, and sometimes completely zany shows.
If you haven’t heard of the Femmemphis Collective, you’re not listening to the right people. Like Quark, Femmemphis has no base of operations and produces work at different venues, with a stated goal of “empowering and promoting the female, female-presenting, and non-binary artistic voices of Memphis.” That’s another way of saying they produce thoughtful, complex, and sometimes completely zany shows like Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties, a mashup of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons. Following in the gender-aware shoes of the defunct New Bridge Ensemble, the Femmemphis Collective proves repeatedly that big budgets can’t buy laughter. The company’s production of Paula Vogel’s dark, Othello-inspired comedy Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief was one of the most consistently funny shows of the 2017-18 season. And one of the most touching and thought-provoking, too.
Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief was performed at Theatre South, a black box performance venue operated by Memphis’ best known little company, Voices of the South. VOTS has been dedicated to creating original work and adapting Southern authors to the stage since the 1990s. Since moving into its first permanent home in Cooper-Young’s First Congregational Church, the company has dedicated itself to developing new writing talent and growing annual events like the Memphis Children’s Theatre Festival and the new Memphis Fringe, a multi-weekend event serving festival-goers a diverse sampler platter of alternative regional performance.
It’s impossible to imagine what Memphis’ current independent theater scene might look like without Playhouse on the Square. With a firm understanding that young artists need places to train and new plays are the theater’s life blood, Circuit Playhouse Inc. — the parent company of Playhouse on the Square and Circuit Playhouse — oversaw the creation of TheatreWorks, originally in Downtown’s South Main Arts District, and ultimately in Overton Square.
POTS is also responsible for transforming the Evergreen Theatre (formerly Circuit Playhouse on Poplar Ave. at Evergreen) into a TheatreWorks-inspired rental house, and home to companies with no performance space of their own. Companies sharing space at TheatreWorks and Evergreen include Cazateatro, Memphis’ only bilingual company, and The Emerald Theatre Company, which produces a range of theater with Memphis’ LGBTQ community in mind. Ruby Gray, co-founder of the Women’s Theatre Festival of Memphis and Bluff City Theatre Company (formerly the Bluff City Tri-Art Theatre Company), produces new, regionally developed work with an eye toward empowering overlooked artists — women and artists from communities of color in particular.
Bluff City Theatre Company
If your idea of alternative theater includes strong personal and political statements, broad clowning, fully democratized dance, and giant exploding puppets, Our Own Voice is the troupe you’re looking for. You never know what you’re going to get with OOV, which has been Memphis’ most consistently experimental small company for the past 27 years. Originally created as a forum for original work by and for people marginalized by mental illness, OOV has expanded its definition of mental health and its mission.
Of all the resident companies performing at Evergreen and TheatreWorks, Cloud9 Memphis and the New Moon Theatre Company cut the closest to the mainstream while remaining firmly left of center. Working a vein similar to Quark, Cloud9 found its identity with a 2017 production of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Marjorie Prime, a deceptively spare dramedy about artificial intelligence units developed as companions for the elderly. Although it is still a small, space-renting company, the award-winning New Moon is well on its way to becoming one of Memphis’ next institutions.
New Moon was created for the specific purpose of producing some of the most dense and difficult examples of experimental drama from the mid-twentieth century. Slowly the mission involved away from all that and grew to include infrequently produced classics like Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending and edgy contemporary material like Tracy Letts’ brutal Killer Joe. New Moon has also embraced Halloween the way larger companies have embraced the Christmas season. Every fall they produce scary and scary-fun shows that have ranged from a locally written Civil War zombie musical to ghost stories like The Woman in Black, to politically charged vampire tales like Cuddles, and Shakespeare’s infamous slasher tragedy Titus Andronicus.
The Memphis Little Theatre is all grown up now. In fact, Theatre Memphis celebrates its 100th Birthday in 2020 and looks like it’s here to stay. But tomorrow’s big institutions are bubbling up around us all the time; they’re just small now, and ranging in age from newly born to nearly 30. If you’re already a theater fan, at least one of these companies is doing something you’ll want to follow. If you’re theater-curious but not a big fan of what our bigger playhouses are serving up, there’s another world entirely, taking place underground.
