Over five seasons, the ensemble has created productions of Tennessee Williams’ Small Craft Warnings and William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life presented in repertory as “The Bar Plays” (2019), James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (2017), Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day (2018) and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (with Café Nordo, 2016), as well as workshop productions of Federico García Lorca Blood Wedding (2018), Shakespeare’s Henry VI (2014) and Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood (2015).Īrtistic Director Ryan Guzzo Purcell is from Seattle’s South End: he lives, and The Williams Project is based, just minutes from where he grew up on Beacon Hill. Since, The Williams Project has brought professional, accessible theatre to thousands of audience members in Washington. Following Orpheus Descending’s warm public reception and critical praise – The Williams Project’s debut was included on The Seattle Times’ list of the top ten theatre productions of the year and named best play of the year by BroadwayWorld Seattle – the company committed to continuing to create theatrical work together. The ensemble spent two weeks building a radically welcoming staging of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending, which was remounted the following year as a part of Intiman Theatre’s 2015 festival. The Williams Project set out to prove that paying artists a living wage to create, in community with one another, results in deeper, more joyful, more inventive, and more revelatory theatrical work to share with audiences. For decades, exploitative wages have resulted in depleted, distracted theatre artists, to the detriment of the artists themselves, their work onstage, and, ultimately, audiences. The residency was an experiment, designed to push back against the nonprofit theatre field’s chronic underpayment of its artists. ![]() The Williams Project was founded in 2014, when Artistic Director Ryan Guzzo Purcell assembled a national group of outstanding Equity actors for a residency in Longview, WA.
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