Reimagining a Community Pillar by Barbara Wells heater Alliance has emphatically found its voice. Last year the company earned seven Helen Hayes Awards; this season it’s won a $10,000 National Theatre Company Grant from American Theatre Wing, bestowed on theaters that have “articulated a distinctive mission, cultivated an audience, and nurtured a community of artists in ways that strengthen the quality, diversity and dynamism of American theatre.” But like all seemingly “overnight” successes, Theater Alliance’s rise is really a testament to decades of sustained support and the tenacity of visionary leadership. From its humble origins as a community theater, by 2002 Theater Alliance had joined Washington’s fledgling professional companies and taken up residence at the new H Street Playhouse amid burgeoning neighborhood revitalization. But eventually management changes and a tough economy took their toll, reducing the company’s 2010 season to just one production: a reprise of Black Nativity. Enter Colin Hovde. In 2011, H Street Playhouse founder and Theater Alliance board member Adele Robey asked Hovde to apply for the theater director’s job — a position he seemed destined to take. A self-described child of hippies, Hovde chose a career in the-
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ater as a form of social service; a way to build community connections. As a teenager approaching high school graduation, he’d even contemplated joining the Peace Corps — until his mentor said he could do more to help people in the theater. At the University of North Carolina School for the Arts, he realized his mission: producing plays that challenge people to think in a more compassionate way. “I want our theater to be about your daily life. I want you to walk down the street and feel more connected to the people you see,” Hovde says. “Of course we want theater to be entertaining, but it’s so much more fulfilling when it entertains and asks hard questions that make us think.” In 2004, when nearly every one of his college classmates made a beeline for New York, Hovde took
off for Macau, China, to produce the Worldwide Arts Collective Festival. Strangely enough, that’s where he met Jeremy Skidmore, a kindred spirit who was then Theater Alliance’s artistic director. The two North Carolina graduates immediately connected, and Skidmore invited Hovde to become the company’s associate director the following year. After his work at Theater Alliance, Hovde spent the next five years as a freelance director and producer until he received Robey’s momentous call to return. He would spend the next year rebuilding
the company’s financial base and navigating its transition from H Street to the new Anacostia Playhouse. “It was a pivotal moment for Theater Alliance,” he says. “We had to ask ourselves, ‘Why are we here? Why do we need to stay alive? What value do we add to the community?” In March 2013, Hovde finally found his answers in Word Becomes Flesh, a hiphop exploration of a father’s right to choose between a commitment to his child and abandonment. The heart-breaking piece featured five young men grappling with fatherhood, visibly changing the perceptions and stirring the emotions of audience members, and Hovde himself.
LEFT TO RIGHT: Occupied Territories. Photo: C. Stanley Photography. Word Becomes Flesh. Night Falls on the Blue Planet. Photo: C. Stanley Photography
The play influenced Theater Alliance’s first season as the resident company at Anacostia Playhouse. All three of the season’s plays were rooted in relatable human experience, but produced in distinct ways that stretched theatrical boundaries: Broke-ology is a classic “kitchen sink” production, using a realistic set to portray the ordinary struggles of a working class family; White Rabbit, Red Rabbit eschewed scenery and even rehearsal altogether, featuring various actors reading the play for the first time at venues across the city; and The Wonderful World of Dissocia was