InterAct Theatre Receives Grant From The William Penn Foundation

InterAct Theatre Company has been awarded a five-year, $652,500 grant award from the William Penn Foundation - the largest and longest (in duration of years) grant award in InterAct's 35-year history -- in support of our most ambitious project ever: The Philly Cycle.

Over the next five seasons, InterAct will award $15,000 commissions to three playwrights and engage three different under-represented communities in the commissioning, development and production of three new plays that will be produced in the 2024-25, 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons at the company's home at The Drake in Center City. Driven by all four of our core values - artistic risk, civic engagement, diversity, and collaboration -- The Philly Cycle will involve several community partners, dozens of local theatre artists and thousands of local residents in a multi-year conversation around three singular, important, local human stories.

The Philly Cycle was inspired by the narrative structure of the critically-acclaimed television series, The Wire (which chronicled Baltimore's drug culture through the lens of law enforcement, labor unions, public education, the political class and the press) and builds on InterAct's history of plays about Philadelphia: Thomas Gibbons' 6221 (about the MOVE tragedy, produced in 1993), Gibbons' PERMANENT COLLECTION (inspired by racial controversies at the Barnes Foundation, in 2003 and 2013), A. Zell Williams' DOWN PAST PASSYUNK (about the Geno's Steaks' "speak American" controversy, in 2014), and Josh Wilder's SALT PEPPER KETCHUP (about gentrification in the Point Breeze neighborhood, in 2018), among others.

"We've had such incredible success engaging new and existing audiences for these Philly-centric stories," says Producing Artistic Director Seth Rozin. "Now, we want to harness the excitement and impact of those unrelated and separately programmed projects by commissioning, developing and producing three plays as part of an intentional cycle. We've been developing this concept for several years and the William Penn Foundation has made it all possible with this extraordinary grant award."

The first play in the Philly Cycle will focus on the local Muslim community. Philadelphia has recently surpassed Detroit and New York City to become the American metropolitan area with the highest proportion of Muslims, now numbering around 200,000, representing between 6-9% of the total population. Yet this population is decidedly under-represented on local (and national) stages. American Muslims have not only been subjected to increased othering, discrimination, and violence in recent years, but remain misunderstood, out of public view and largely absent from mainstream public discourse. InterAct will partner with the Council on American-Islamic Relations Philadelphia (CAIR-PA), which will facilitate engagement with Muslim leaders and residents around the city.

Now in its 35th Season, InterAct is a theatre for today's world, dedicated to producing new and contemporary plays that explore the social, political and cultural issues of our time, and to improving the regional climate for new plays. Founded in 1988 by Producing Artistic Director Seth Rozin, InterAct's work is driven by four core values: artistic risk, civic engagement, diversity and collaboration.

https://www.interacttheatre.org/

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