The Foundry Stage Company will stage four locally written productions this coming season instead of its usual mix of classics and touring scripts, artistic director Marisol Fennimore announced Thursday, a lineup she described as a deliberate bet that Bellwater's own history can fill seats at The Regal Theatre.
The four-production season, which Fennimore has informally titled “Homefront,” opens in the fall with a revival of a decade-old Foundry Stage original about the Kestrel River flood of the 1970s, followed by a new commission from Bellwater-native playwright Curtis Whitlow about the wave of factory closures that hollowed out the city’s manufacturing base in the early 2000s. The season continues in winter with a comedy set inside a fictionalized version of a Vale Avenue diner, and closes in spring with a devised piece built from interviews the company’s actors conducted with residents of Lowertown and Riverside Heights over the past year.
“We’ve done Chekhov, we’ve done touring productions of shows that already had a life in three other cities before they got to us,” Fennimore said. “This year I wanted an audience to walk out of The Regal Theatre and recognize their own street, their own grandfather, their own diner. That’s a much bigger risk than programming something safe, and I think it’s the right one.”
A commissioned centerpiece
The season’s most closely watched entry is likely to be Whitlow’s commissioned play, still untitled at Thursday’s announcement, which draws on his own family’s experience when his father was laid off from a Foundry Row fastener plant. Whitlow, who has written for regional theaters outside Bellwater but never had a full production staged in his hometown, said he pitched the idea to Fennimore two years ago after a smaller staged reading drew an unexpectedly large crowd to a Lowertown community center.
“I’ve been trying to get somebody to take this play seriously since before I could afford to write full time,” Whitlow said. “Marisol was the first artistic director in this city who didn’t ask me to make it more universal, whatever that means. She wanted it to be more specifically Bellwater, not less.”
Every theater company in this city has told a story about somewhere else. I got tired of waiting for someone to tell one about here.
Curtis Whitlow, playwright
A financial bet, not just an artistic one
The all-local season is also a financial gamble for a nonprofit theater company that has run tight margins for years. Fennimore acknowledged that touring productions, while less artistically distinctive, have historically been a more reliable draw for subscribers who recognize a title from reviews elsewhere. Foundry Stage’s board approved the season on a narrow vote after Fennimore presented projections showing ticket revenue could fall short of the past two seasons even in an optimistic scenario, a shortfall the company hopes to offset through a planned grant application and expanded group-sales outreach to unions and neighborhood associations.
“I’d be lying if I said the board wasn’t nervous,” Fennimore said. “But I told them, if this company can’t tell Bellwater’s own stories, I don’t know what we’re actually here for.”
The season will also mark the company’s first significant partnership with the Bellwater Museum of Art, whose new Ironworks Wing devoted to the city’s manufacturing history opened earlier this year. Curator Priscilla Adeyemi said the museum will host a series of talkback events tied to Whitlow’s play, pairing cast members with former factory workers whose oral histories are archived in the new gallery.
Fennimore said she also expects the season’s closing piece, the devised work built from Lowertown and Riverside Heights interviews, to be the most logistically demanding production the company has attempted. Rather than working from a finished script, the ensemble will spend the coming months conducting and transcribing interviews with residents before assembling a text collaboratively, a process Fennimore has used only once before, on a much smaller scale, early in her tenure.
“It’s a slower, messier way to build a show than just handing actors a script,” Fennimore said. “But if we’re going to claim we’re telling this city’s stories, I don’t think we get to skip the part where we actually go knock on doors and listen before we decide what the story is.”
- The season opens this fall with a revival of “High Water,” the company’s decade-old original about the Kestrel River flood.
- Curtis Whitlow’s commissioned mill-closures play follows in winter, paired with talkback events at the Bellwater Museum of Art.
- A devised piece built from resident interviews across Lowertown and Riverside Heights closes the season next spring.
Fennimore said subscription renewals will determine whether the all-local approach becomes a permanent shift or a one-season experiment. Early indicators, she said, are encouraging: advance interest in the Whitlow commission alone has already outpaced ticket inquiries for last season’s touring closer at a comparable point in the calendar.
“I don’t need every seat in the house every night,” Fennimore said. “I need enough people in enough of those seats to prove that a theater in this city can survive telling the truth about it instead of borrowing someone else’s story.”