In 2014, Ryan Purcell brought together an ensemble for an experiment: put up two plays in two weeks while paying the artists a living wage. Because one play was by Tennessee Williams and the other by William Shakespeare, he called it The Williams Project.

Over the last decade, our company has grown from that one-off project into a model for an abundant American theatre company, producing works from authors as diverse as Lorca, Baldwin, Wilde, and Hansberry. As we developed a signature aesthetic, built infrastructure to sustain our ambitious economic model, and continued paying artists well, our name fit us less and less.

“The Williams Project” made it sound like we only do Tenessee Williams and we do it traditionally. It evoked old, dead museum theatre. And it failed to articulate our aesthetic or what we stand for economically. It also wasn’t terribly sexy.

Thus, as we hit our 10th anniversary, we are reintroducing ourselves under a new name: The Feast.

The Feast speaks to the abundance, ambition, and welcome we seek to offer our audiences, artists, and friends. We seek to model the bounty the theatrical ecosystem could—and should—offer everyone it serves.

This change in name doesn’t change our core values, just better expresses them. We welcome you, with open arms, to this new phase of our work.