Thank you so much to all our patrons and donors in 2017. We’re proud to look back on all our accomplishments this year, which we couldn’t have done without your support.
Here are a few of the great things you helped Brave Spirits achieve in 2017:
- Our most successful season kick-off fundraiser so far, Spring2Action, raised over $4,000, twice our original goal.
- Three productions:
- ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, directed by Artistic Director Charlene V. Smith
- A King and No King, directed by BST Artistic Associate Cassie Ash, our fifth early modern play which we were the first company in the DC region to professionally produce
- Doctor Faustus, directed by Faction of Fools artistic director Paul Reisman
- One staged reading, The Custom of the Country, produced as part of WSC Avant Bard‘s 2017 Scripts-in-Play Festival.
- The Incest Rep sold the largest number of total tickets for a BST production so far.
- The Incest Rep was reviewed in the academic journal Shakespeare Bulletin, which stated that “these lively, intelligent productions further solidified Brave Spirits as an important voice in the Washington DC area’s increasingly vibrant and varied theater scene.”
- Received two grants for the first time:
- from the City of Alexandria
- from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts
- Launched our History is 2020 fundraising campaign
- Raised over $27,000 for the Histories project!
- Renovated our performance space to bring it closer to being a variable seating professional black box theatre
Finally, the Incest Rep was honored in Shakespeareances.com 2017 in Review, as the Number 1 non-Shakespeare production:
“Brave Spirits packaged these two Jacobean plays centered on sibling sexual relationships using a single cast. The plays view the topic from different angles and styles of composition, and the two directors, Cassie Ash for A King and No King and Charlene V. Smith for ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, take appropriately different approaches to their texts. Whereas ‘Tis Pity played like a hyperdramatic soap opera on Starz, King was a zinging ensemble comedy along the lines of Arrested Development. My favorite of the two is A King and No King, such a thoroughly modern piece in its character-driven ironic humor played with impeccable timing. While, I’m not a Ford fan, in the hands of this company his plot’s sick twists slackened jaws in a way I’ve never seen before in a theater. The juxtaposition of the two, along with the talents of their shared casts, heightened the appreciation of both. Creating gut-wrenching shock and gut-busting laughter with a single cast in back-to-back performances was a crowning theatrical achievement for this small, fledgling company.“