AMERICAN THEATRE | Soho Rep Takes a Sharp Turn Toward New Horizons

“It’s not the first time Soho Rep has encountered the loss of Walkerspace, but it will likely be the last.”

—Eric Ting

After nearly 30 years and countless memories in their malleable black box theatre at 46 Walker Street, the pioneering Soho Rep, a bastion of avant-garde theatre and fierce protector of the weird, will close Walkerspace’s storied doors. Their sights are set on new horizons—namely, Playwrights Horizons.

Beginning in January 2025, Soho Rep will embark on a two- to three-year space-sharing partnership, independently producing within the larger Off-Broadway institution on 42nd Street, where they will produce in the 128-seat Peter Jay Sharp Theater, located on the building’s fourth floor. This collaboration, in the hands of Soho Rep’s directors Cynthia Flowers, Caleb Hammons, and Eric Ting as well as Playwrights Horizons artistic director Adam Greenfield, associate artistic director Natasha Sinha, and managing director Casey York, promises to be transformative for both companies.

For Soho Rep, there are practical benefits to walking away from Walker. At the crest of the pandemic, the building’s longtime landlord (and the Rep’s consistent ally) died, leaving the company vulnerable. The building was acquired by a company actively scooping up many properties across New York City. When I spoke with Flowers, she described precipitous rent increases in this once-grubby nook of lower Manhattan. One small venue-turned-gallery across the street was put on the market in 2023 for anywhere from $30,000 to $60,000 per month (based on average price per square foot). For reference, when she started at Soho Rep more than a decade ago, the company paid about $4,000 a month in rent. Today it’s nearly three times that.

Flowers, along with former co-leaders Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who departed the company in 2022, could see the writing on the sweating walls for years. That troubled trio set the mission of securing a new home in motion. The building’s ongoing issues with plumbing and water damage, combined with an insufficient electricity supply that prevents running A/C during some tech rehearsals and performances, make safe (and, frankly, sane) work impossible. “There’s at least one day every tech week where you lose electricity and have to stop work for four to six hours,” Flowers noted.

What’s more, Soho Rep’s current space isn’t accessible to the disabled and lacks essential in-house features like laundry, storage, and wing space. The company’s exemplary commitment to paying resident artists a living wage also results in rising production costs, but as Walkerspace can only seat around 65 people a performance, even for their most in-demand productions—the Starbucks franchises scattered across Tribeca’s corners could likely hold more. Sustainability, under these circumstances, is too slippery.

There is more than pragmatism to this venture with Playwrights Horizons, though. Fans of both companies’ piercing and adventurous offerings can surely clock their creative alignments: a loyalty to contemporary theatremakers, the incubation of new works, a commitment to risk.

“We’re not just asking ourselves, what does it mean to rent a part of their building? but actually, are there ways for the best practices at each of our individual organizations to influence the other?” said Hammons, who with Ting assumed leadership roles beside Flowers in 2023, already knowing the move was inevitable. “Are there ways both our organizations can learn from each other during this period of partnership so that it doesn’t feel just like a temporary affair, but rather a milestone?”

The answers to those questions seem to be a resounding yes. When I spoke to Adam Greenfield, only excitement about the union fell from his lips.

“I want this partnership to show that two theatres working together are much greater than the sum of their parts,” he said. “In opening ourselves up to a true collaboration, we’re actually expanding the possibilities for Playwrights. Through partnership, through a real genuine collaboration where you’re opening yourself up to other ways of working and perspectives, and in doing so making yourself vulnerable, we are creating more possibilities for ourselves.”

That prophecy is already coming true. Both Greenfield and Sinha describe their ongoing meetings with Soho Rep’s leaders as fruitful, with continual discoveries about ways to advance equity and community engagement in their own artistic home. There will even be a co-production to cap both organizations’ 2024-25 seasons.

Of course, the physical loss of Walkerspace may haunt some audiences. In New York City, losing a space you love can gnaw like a phantom limb. The venue’s agile form and the previous landlord’s easy acceptance of internal shape-shifting afforded designers and directors an architectural playground. Plays over seasons could all look so drastically different: In debbie tucker green’s generations, thousands of pounds of red clay soil morphed the space into a South African township kitchen; in Raja Feather Kelly’s The Fires, an extended railroad apartment stretched the entire length of the room; in Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte’s Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month, a giant vulva served as a door.

Smaller organizations like Soho Rep also play by a different set of administrative rules: They’re less likely to have individual departments, in-house casting directors or shop leaders, and staffed crew. There was a freedom to that—but there’s a newfound freedom in partnership too. Though Horizons’ Sharp Theater may not provide the same free-form flexibility, the new house (and the doubled amount of seating) will better meet the organization’s evolving needs.

Everyone, particularly Greenfield, is aware of how physical space can shape one’s experience of art. “I look at the Playwrights Horizons building and I love it. I’m so grateful for our space,” he effuses. But he admitted that the building’s sleek glass doors and ascending staircase combine to “project a kind of stability that, honestly, isn’t real, and has never been real. In theatre, we’ve always been rats and scavengers. When you walk into theatre lobbies like Soho Rep, you know what it is that you’re walking into; the building frames the experience.”

Greenfield clearly sees this partnership as an opportunity to merge the former’s polish with the latter’s scrappiness.

“I’m asking myself, How can I change what it feels like to walk into Playwrights Horizons so that your expectations of the kind of bold work you’re going to see there will be aligned with what it feels like to be in the space? How can I continue to produce really risk-taking work and encourage an audience’s generosity of heart towards that work in a building made of granite and terrazzo floors and glass?” he added with a chuckle.

This alignment of physical space and artistic intent will be crucial to the partnership’s success. While there’s already a solid overlap of artists who’ve worked with both companies (including Anne Washburn, Raja Feather Kelly, Dustin Wills, and David Adjmi, to name a few), their typical audiences differ, often splitting along nebulous lines of downtown versus uptown theatre buffs. In reality, those lines (aesthetic and geographical) are blurring more and more regardless.

Unlike Soho Rep, several keystone downtown companies have had to cease operations altogether, while rising costs have displaced much of the artist class that once filled lower Manhattan. The shuttering of theatres nationwide during the Covid pandemic shifted theatre viewing habits altogether, germinating more performances in parks, in homes, on our phones. The shifts that are taking place remind one of Annalisa Dias’ 2023 essay “Decomposition Instead of Collapse — Dear Theatre, Be Like Soil,” published in Rescripted.

“A dramaturgy of decomposition is a tender invitation beyond loss toward re-membering our interconnected futures,” Dias muses. Stanzas of her poetic essay are laced with clues to the industry’s next steps, and an apt challenge to return to theatre’s original ways: “I long for a theatre that turns its gaze downward to the land, outward to the water, and upward to the sky.”

The notion of a theatre beyond the walls is not out of the question in this next, nascent chapter for Soho Rep. Of course, the goal of landing in another building and reigniting the vibrancy and individuality that comes from having a home of one’s own is still there. But, Flowers pointed out, “Even a 99-seater requires a $20 million campaign for a building.” So the current realities of the artistic landscape have led Soho Rep’s executives to embrace extreme flexibility, cracking them open to follow where their community leads. The ethical consequences of embarking on a capital campaign at this time are also a consideration, and the alliance with Playwrights Horizons allows its leaders more time to think carefully about the possibilities for the responsible direction of funds. “We can actually let the artists that we’re interested in lead us,” said Ting. That could mean “renting another theatre, but it also could be a community garden. We don’t know that part yet, but we have the freedom to find out.”

Ultimately, change is at the root of just about everything we do in the theatre. Displacement can’t be something we meet only with fear—hell, it’s already there in Soho Rep’s name, as theatre hasn’t been based in Soho for three decades, nor do they produce theatre in rep. Walkerspace has faced hurricane flooding, a pandemic, accelerating gentrification, and an emergency shutdown in 2016 for city-mandated renovations. A company born with its eyes on the classics like Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Aristophanes is now a hotbed for some of our most dazzling and dangerous writers. (Case in point: The finale of Soho Rep’s tenure at 46 Walker Street will be a ribald queer collaboration marrying stage and script royalty Carmelita Tropicana and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins—an absolute feast for the experimental theatre lover). While this new partnership will impact the operations of two successful companies, it won’t threaten either’s will. The onus turns on us—audiences, innovators, vanguards of the living art—to embrace the challenge ahead and place our trust in the same practice we go to the theatre to witness: transformation.

Brittani Samuel (she/her) is an arts journalist, theatre critic, and the co-editor of 3Views on Theater. Her work has appeared in American Theatre Magazine, Broadway News, and The New York Times. She is an alum of the BIPOC Critics Lab and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute, as well as the inaugural recipient of ATCA’s Edward Medina Prize for Excellence in Cultural Criticism. 

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