Progressive Theatre Workshop

April 20th, 2009

To Our Audience and Supporters:

We would like to take a moment to extend our sincerest of thanks to each of you for the support you have offered PTW since we began pushing forward in our efforts to create new and challenging pieces of theatre. Your contributions and patronage were key to the success we have experienced thus far and we are glad to have been able to share that success with you.

It has been an incredibly reassuring year for us as we have seen theatre in Phoenix move toward a landscape that allows for an increasingly diverse community of artists who are ready and able to challenge and disrupt convention. We view this disruption as something that is complimentary to tradition and believe that it will only strengthen the missions of all theatre artists locally.

Since our last piece closed in February, we have been spending a great deal of time evaluating the work we have done thus far. We have also taken a careful look at our current process of creating art as it relates to our sustainability and growth. As we move forward, we continue to be committed to producing pieces that are of the utmost quality. Additionally, we are going to be placing more emphasis on the cultivation of a resident group of collaborators that come together often to develop our work. As a result of this recent period of calibration and structural analysis, there are some significant changes that are being implemented effective immediately.

No Season Schedule

Because the nature of PTW's work centers around the development of new texts through workshop, group collaboration, and devising, we are moving away from the traditional season structure and instead will adopt a single project based approach to bringing our productions to audiences. This simply means that we will no longer predetermine any sort of schedule beyond the project that is in immediate development. While we are extremely proud of our work thus far, we feel it is in our best interest to give each project the time and resources it demands. Some may take a few months while others might take longer.

Development Outside of Arizona

PTW's Artistic Director, John Caswell, Jr., will begin a lengthy production internship with Ontological Hysteric Theatre in New York City in July where he will be assisting and observing their Founding Artistic Director, Richard Foreman, on his new play being produced at The Public Theatre. In addition to this opportunity for professional and artistic development, John will also be collaborating with other artists to develop a new piece tentatively titled Banksy's Bodies which is inspired by the images and writings of English graffiti and installation artist, Banksy.

As a result, John will be relocating to New York City where he will begin developing new works for PTW outside of Arizona. While the company has every intention of performing locally in Arizona in the future, the bulk of development and administrative operations will be temporarily based in New York for obvious reasons.

Temporary Hiatus

In preparation for these very exciting developments, we are announcing a temporary hiatus and a suspension of the rest of our season which was to include Eat Your Peas/DIE DIE DIE. The primary reasons for choosing to pull our final show have been key in influencing our decision to eliminate season scheduling. While developing the text for Peas, the production concept moved in a direction that required much more research, writing, and rehearsal time than we had allotted. It was a difficult lesson to learn but ultimately we had to choose between indefinitely postponing the production or pushing it forward at lesser quality.