Regional Theater of the Week: The Weekend Theater in Little Rock, AR

By: Christina Mancuso

BroadwayWorld.com, the largest theatre site on the Internet, is excited to announce a new feature to its comprehensive regional coverage - the Featured Regional Theater of the Week! Each week, BWW will introduce its readers to a regional theater located in one of our (over 130!) coverage cities. By exploring these different venues, their history and showcasing the production seasons, BWW continues its commitment to expand our presence in communities and cities across the United States.

This Week's Featured Regional Theater: The Weekend Theater in Little Rock, Arkansas

The Weekend Theater is a non-profit theatrical community that produces socially significant plays for the central Arkansas community. Their story dates back to 1993 to a production staged at a local church.

Today, though, the intimate theater is located in a wonderful, comfortably remodeled two-story building at the corner of 7th and Chester streets in Little Rock. For theater-lovers, the setting is decidedly New York in character - apartments upstairs, theater downstairs, pizza joint/microbrewery across one street, and the local fire station across the other! And now, the theater is totally smoke-free.

Although called The Weekend Theater because they are volunteers who work at daytime jobs and perform only on the weekends, a more descriptive name might be community playhouse. They attempt to be a true community of people dedicated to the teaching, learning and practice of kindness, respect and honor. In short, they hope to practice “community,” the coming together into a oneness.

Unlike other theaters, while the performance and product are important, they remain secondary. Primary is how they treat each other and how, through our plays and musicals, they teach themselves how to care about others. They attempt to accomplish this goal by personally, interpersonally, and educationally reducing prejudice, cruelty and indifference, which are so often created by emphasizing human differences, including gender, race, age, religion, sexual orientation, disability, health status, etc. To accomplish this, they choose plays of social significance, with themes in which people learn through such things as suffering, cruelty, and insensitivity. In order to “practice what we preach,” the volunteers of The Weekend Theater agree to interact with as much thoughtfulness and awareness of the actions and the effects those actions might have on themselves and each other as they are capable of at the present time. They attempt to grow more compassionate with each interaction. In these ways they hope to increase understanding which leads to kindness and to decrease miscommunication that leads to so much suffering.

The 2012 season included SPRING AWAKENING, THE FULL MONTY, SOUTHERN CROSS, GOOD PEOPLE, and ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.  The current production now playing is RAFT OF THE MEDUSA.  Following that andn continuing into the 2013 season will be THE OUTSIDERS, THE METAL CHILDREN, AIN'T NOTHING BUT A THANG, COMPANY, THE PARIS LETTER and more. 

For tickets or to learn more about the Weekend Theater, visit: http://www.weekendtheater.org/

Know of a theater we should feature? Send your suggestion to christina@broadwayworld.com.