Morgan Crumbly in Actor’s Express’s 2023 production of “cullud wattah” by Erika Dickerson-Despenza. (Photo by Casey Gardner Ford)
Located in Atlanta’s West Midtown neighborhood, a former “industrial haven” for factories and warehouses that dates back to the 1880s which has lately been reinventing itself, minutes from downtown Atlanta, is the massive King Plow Arts Center, the home of Actor’s Express. To call the King Plow Arts Center sprawling, as the theatre does on its website, might be an understatement: The complex, converted from a former plow factory, includes a total of 16 buildings, approximately 256,000 square feet of space, housing over 100 tenants and condo owners, with businesses ranging from fine arts (photographers, sculptors, painters) to architecture firms, a modeling agency, advertising agencies, and more.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that this bustling collection of art and artists also houses a theatre that, for the last three and half decades, has provided provocative productions to the local community, ranging from Tony-winning musicals to Pulitzer-winning plays to world premieres from Atlanta-based playwrights like Daryl Fazio (2018’s The Flower Room), Kira Rockwell (2023’s Oh, To Be Pure Again), and Lee Osorio (2024’s A Third Way).
We corresponded recently with artistic director Freddie Ashley about the theatre’s past, present, and future.
Who founded Actor’s Express, when, and why?
Actor’s Express was founded in 1988 by Chris Coleman and Harold Leaver. The mission has always centered on contemporary work produced in an adventurous way, a principle that has shifted in some ways over time but remains the core of our identity. We were initially in a church basement, a home we lost when the landlord objected to the nudity in a production. For several years we were located in Atlanta’s historic Inman Park neighborhood, and we have been located in West Midtown since 1994.
Tell us a little more about yourself and your background.
I grew up in Rome, Georgia, located about an hour and a half northwest of Atlanta. My first exposure to the arts was singing in a local boys’ choir. It was how I was introduced to classical music and sacred music. Despite having very little exposure to theatre, I decided to major in it in college until I figured out what I really wanted to do. But I ended up staying with it. I did my graduate work at the University of Southern Mississippi and moved to Atlanta after a small stint in Kentucky. I’m a lifelong Southerner, and I love the complexities and contradictions within all that that implies.
What sets your theatre apart from others in your region?
We have built our identity on producing fearless work in a rigorous and adventurous way. It’s deeply important to us to make work that kickstarts conversations and self-reflection. I’ve been told by so many of the artists we’ve worked with over the years that they feel this is the theatre where they do their best work. I think that has to do with our approach to the work, but also to the kind of positive environment we try to create in which artists feel empowered to take risks. I am a person of conscience and try to ensure that this translates across the whole organization.
Tell us about your favorite theatre institution other than your own, and why you admire it.
Locally, Theatrical Outfit is doing consistently outstanding work. And I’ve always been a huge fan of D.C. theatre, most notably Studio and Woolly Mammoth. They have great taste in plays and produce them really well.
How do you pick the plays you put on your stage?
I’ve often used a seemingly simple rubric that defines our artistic identity within a finite bandwidth but then finds as much variety as possible within it. And while I have a strong sense of who we are, I allow that bandwidth to shift, expand, and contract. We always interrogate how the plays we select engage with the current moment. Our reasons for doing a play, as well as how we may approach producing it, come out of that interrogation.
What’s your annual budget, and how many artists do you employ each season?
Our annual budget is $1.5 million. We generally employ or contract no fewer than 150 artists each season.
How has your theatre fared since the end of the Covid-19 lockdown?
Like so many of our colleague theatres, we have confronted the challenges of audience attrition, painful cash flow, and curtailed philanthropy from institutional funders. But we’ve been hitting some important benchmarks in our recovery. For example, this season our subscriptions have rebounded to (and topped) pre-pandemic numbers. Many of these are first-time subscribers. And we have seen an encouraging increase in first time single-ticket buyers. Early in the recovery, we heard a lot of feedback from every direction that audiences were no longer interested in the kind of theatre we do, that they only wanted comfort food, so to speak. But I’ve been very pleased to discover that our audiences still crave challenging work and muscular storytelling with big emotional experiences.
How has your theatre responded to calls for racial justice and more equitable working conditions that have arisen with new urgency in the past few years?
This work has always been part of our DNA, but since 2020 we have become more aware of how we have to be intentional and proactive in every way. We have been much more intentional about what stories we tell, who is telling them, and what kind of environment in which they are telling them. We have also placed a more concerted focus on how we and our work engage with the communities in our city. We include in every contract our Discrimination, Harassment, and Conduct Policy that not only outlines expectations for behavior, but also provides clear systems of redress, support, and accountability for anyone who might experience something negative. So we’re mindful of how this intentionality shows up in the work itself, as well as in every process at all levels of the organization.
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