Stone Soup Theatre Programs
Stone Soup presents five stage productions annually that highlight the one-act play, including one-acts by established playwrights. Over the last several years Stone Soup presented well-reviewed performances of “Fool for Love,” by Sam Shephard, "The Boundary and Inspector Hound" by Tom Stoppard, "How I Learned to Drive" by Paula Vogel, "The Complete Wrks of Wllam Shkspr", and Horton Foote's "The Young Man from Atlanta" in addition to our annual production of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.
Stone Soup Theatre has also been running both Summer and after-school programs to great success since 1996. We provide after-school classes for over 20 schools in the Seattle area and present 3 fully staged productions a year with our Youth Conservatory at our DownStage theatre in Wallingford. The after school classes feature a progressive program that instructs students in theatrical skills including improvisation, story drama, scene study, playwriting, music theatre, and Shakespearean study. After school programs at schools are adaptable and developed with participating schools to take into account class size and available budget.
Recent Successes and Current Challenges
Stone Soup Theatre's Education Department has expanded and developed two internship programs to supply our demand for after-school Drama classes. Our Teaching Internship allows Stone Soup to continue to build our teaching pool and our Education Internship allows our Education Director to spend more time at the schools directly supervising our programs, training and evaluating our teachers. Currently, Stone Soup Theatre is aiming to find the funds to provide free after-school programs for schools who can't afford it.
Working with a consultant, Stone Soup has embarked on a multi-year strategic effort to increase capacity in order to meet the demand. Doing so requires more staff, more time available to current staff positions, and greater financial resources to provide high-quality teaching artists for these programs. Having successfully completed a capital campaign for the renovation of the DownStage Theatre, Stone Soup is prepared to commit resources to increasing its contributed income in diverse forms including corporate sponsorships, grant support and especially individual giving. Through strategic board development, we intend to build Stone Soup’s Board of Directors from its current dedicated working core of theatre professionals into a community-based governance board capable of fundraising and guiding the theatre into this new era.