In the shell of an American theatre that is decomposing, shuttering, shrinking, and getting safer, The Feast seeks to model an alternative: A nimble, artist-driven ensemble theatre that makes maximalist, collectivist work; pays really well; and offers sliding-scale tickets.
Our ultimate vision is an aesthetically and materially abundant theatrical ecosystem, in which artists are paid handsomely to produce ambitious, risky work. We pursue this vision by cultivating one model (hopefully among many). We strive to show that an abundant theatre is—ever imperfectly—possible, even under systems of austerity and oppression.
To meaningfully move towards this vision, we must be accountable for both our successes and our failures; the process of moving towards this vision is as important as the vision itself. Thus, we aim to prove, in both the art we make and how we make it, that a more abundant theatre is possible.
Our mission and vision are made manifest in our artists, our paychecks, and our events.
With our artists, we revel in extremity, maximalism, and collectivism. In a moment of two-person, ninety-minute, unit set, often conceptually straightforward plays, The Feast seeks to offer a full meal.
Our work is maximalist and sweaty. Our artists give their all and work in extremis. Our actors have worked to develop virtuosic voices and expressive bodies, and they use them fully. They bring not only individual characters but whole communities and ideas to life. Our plays often have eight or more people onstage, some kind of chorus, and might last three hours.
Our designers create opulence from the every day—heightening trash, found spaces, or even the normalcy of a proscenium stage. Performances might be in a church or an industrial zone, a gallery or a community center, or a major regional theater.
We choose plays that are thorny, messy, and resist easy resolutions. Our playwrights embrace allegory and symbolism; demand the holding of contradictory ideas; and gesture at something more vulnerable, more grotesque, more erotic, and more embodied than pure representation.
We smacked into this aesthetic in our debut production of Orpheus Descending, wherein four members of the ensemble played over twenty townspeople. By virtuosically shifting between portraying town gossip and business leaders, “sweet” church ladies and their klansmen husbands, these actors laid bare the ways every single community member was complicit in the violence and racism undergirding Williams’ supposedly “naturalistic” drama.
We don’t hold a mirror up to nature; we amplify and distill it. Where naturalism normalizes the world as it is, we seek to reveal what is broken and buried, and in so doing, open up new possibilities.
The paychecks have to be maximalist too. At The Feast, there are no starving artists—literally. We operate from the premise that there is enough for everyone. Our artists are working hard— doing special, intricate physical and emotional labor that should be paid, well, in cash. You can check our receipts.
We fight against the scarcity mindset—both within ourselves, our industry, and our culture—that promises to find abundance some future day when there’s more money. We have seen too often someday become never. We pay the same as theatres with fifty times our budget and we pay five times better than theatres with our same budget. As these examples prove, artist pay isn’t truly a question of resources, but of prioritization. In capitalism, there is always a reason to pay people less than they are worth. Without actively prioritizing cash for artists, companies large and small buy into a model in which “someday” there will be enough. We will not scrimp or exploit on the way.
As producers, we believe we must create plenty, rather than rely on the financial sacrifice of artists to survive and grow as a company. How do we do this? We build a budget based on caring for our artists. To afford it, we do the unglamorous, uncomfortable, and much-less-fun-than-doing-a-play work of fundraising. We do this relentlessly; we simply won’t make the art if we can’t pay the artists who make it fairly.
Finally, our events demonstrate that abundance can only arrive collectively.
In the 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” This was in defense of her slogan “There is no alternative” to capitalism.
Needless to say, we disagree with Maggie. We seek to be a part of a broad tradition of artists pushing against individualism—wrestling with and communing with society.
When the American theatre prioritizes dramas that are small, individual, and contained within the self or the family, they are stripping theatre of its essential function to connect us to something wider. The ritual of American theatre is too often one of isolation: Audiences arrive with their date or their family, transactionally buy an $80 ticket, face in the same direction as every other audience member, watch a story centering the individual experience of a person or family, leave, perhaps talk to their date on the ride home, and return to their private lives.
Alternately, we create rituals that make the collective visceral—in the care and solidarity we can offer each other, the parties we can throw, the cathartic reckonings we can experience, and (tragically) the violence and destruction we can whip up.
To achieve this, our plays feature choruses, communities, and shared politics, showing how the individual cannot be divorced from the society in which they live. We use theatrical, spatial, sensory, and experiential techniques to interrupt the traditional relationship between audience and the art, allowing us to imagine and briefly participate in new forms of society.
For example, in 2018’s Blood Wedding, staged site-specifically in an industrial art space, instead of putting all three acts of the play on the same stage, we created three different audience orientations for each act. In the first act, the audience moved through different domestic scenes in small groups. In the second act, the full audience convened for the wedding celebration. And in the third act, we invited audiences into a new courtyard, lit a bunch of trashcans on fire, and actors stood above audiences on top of shipping containers. (And we served paella and sangria.)
By creating a different sensory and spatial experience of the home, the wedding, and the wild, audiences embodied Lorca’s insight that we are different selves in our families, in our communities, and as outcasts. In all of our work, we seek to prefigure, alongside audiences, different possibilities for collectivism.
In order to disrupt individualism and transactionalism, we have prioritized pay-what-you-can tickets from the beginning. This practice invites everyone, across the economic spectrum, to show up appropriately for the collective, assessing their broader economic position in society and engaging with the resources of those around them. Sliding scales ask everyone—whether they can afford nothing, below “standard” ticket prices, or more than their share—to contribute the collective. It takes compassion toward others to give more than you have to, just as it takes self-compassion to seek access to cultural offerings if you’re under-resourced financially. If we all bring, truly, what we have, there will be enough for us all.* Both how you buy a ticket and what the ticket buys you create a microcosm of a collective society. Part of abundance is trusting that if people across the economic spectrum will show up to support this work, there will be enough.
You are invited to our feast, as artist, as audience, as patron, as friend. We invite you to join us in creating a microcosm of the artistic ecosystem we crave. We’ll see you at our table.
*Gratitude to Laura Aldaine for this language on sliding-scale principles