Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
From left: Trish Brown and Joy Addler
Trish Brown and Joy Addler have collaborated in theater in St. Louis for years, gaining a deep appreciation for each other’s ideas, style, and workflow. At the end of 2019, the pair started to discuss putting together a space of their own, a company that would amplify the voices of women and emerging artists.
Then, well, you know.
But Brown and Addler refused to let the pandemic close the curtain on their brand-new concept. Instead, they spent the worldwide downtime contemplating and clarifying precisely what they wanted to do. And this August, their company, Prism Theatre Company, débuts with a new-works festival, Spotlight on…Women Writing: Prism’s Festival of New Works.
“We had to develop our idea in a world where we didn’t know when we’d be able to do anything,” says Addler, Prism’s managing director. “It gave us a lot of time to really develop ourselves. We got the unexpected pause where we got to home in on what we wanted to do and who we wanted to be.”
They’d known almost from the outset that a new-works festival would be part of each season, with the potential to focus on various underrepresented groups each year. But in the nailing-Jell-O-to-the-wall that was trying to schedule anything at all in 2020, Addler and Brown realized that the new-works festival should be the entire season, at least at first. Over the spring, Prism solicited submissions of new plays by women playwrights based in Missouri or Illinois, and the winning plays are being staged this August. The works will be presented in person.
“We have a motto in our company,” says Brown, Prism’s artistic director. “No matter what comes at you, you just kind of step over it and go on. We had that motto before the pandemic hit.”
Aside from a nimble worldview, the pair also share a love of the prism imagery: One ray of light goes into a prism, and it emerges refracted in all different colors and directions. To them, the prism represents their work of presenting things in a new way—and perhaps new in ways they hadn’t initially considered.
“Theater for a new world—we don’t know what that’s going to look like,” Brown says. “We’re doing our best to make it an experience that’s going to be a positive for everyone. Almost every arts organization is at a place of rebirth—in some ways, this is an advantage for us. We’re starting out, we’ve pivoted a lot, and it hasn’t been such high stakes yet.”
While the goal of the company is to amplify women’s voices, Addler and Brown stress that Prism is inclusive to all comers, and they’re aware of other companies in the area that provide space for women’s work.
“We’re not just a women-only company,” Addler says. “We’re a women-uplifting company.”
Spotlight on…Women Writing: Prism’s Festival of New Works takes place at 7:30 p.m. August 13 & 14 at the Brittany Woods Middle School black box theater, 8125 Groby. Tickets are a $10 minimum donation and can be pre-purchased here.
