Waterwell Celebrates 20th Anniversary With a Party Next Month

Waterwell, the community-organizing theatrical production and education company, will celebrate 20 years of telling engrossing stories that grapple with complex civic questions with a party on Monday, February 12, 2024, to commemorate the milestone. The event will be 7pm to 11pm, with a VIP Cocktail hour at 6pm, held at Greenpoint Loft (67 West Street, Brooklyn). Proceeds from this event will support Waterwell's operations, including its robust education program and adventurous artistic productions.  Tickets can be found here.

Tony winners Jessica Chastain and Audra McDonald serve as Honorary Chairpersons for the event. 

As part of the festivities, Waterwell will present the first-ever “Artist as Citizen Award'' to Tom Ridgely (Waterwell co-founder and the Producing Artistic Director of St. Louis Shakespeare Festival) and Shanta Thake (Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and former Waterwell Board Chair). The award acknowledges and celebrates individuals who exemplify to the world what it means to better society through art and civics.

“The last 20 years of Waterwell’s existence could not have been possible without co-founder Tom Ridgley’s ingenuity, artistic brilliance, and entrepreneurial spirit,” says Waterwell co-founder and Board Chair, Arian Moayed. “On the heels of 9/11, Tom and I created Waterwell to help better the world, and he continues to do that at St. Louis Shakespeare Festival. Tom helped develop Waterwell’s ‘Artist as Citizen’ ethos, and we are so grateful for his care and rigor. Shanta Thake has always been the gold standard of civic engagement through art for Waterwell and myself. Since our early 20s, Shanta has always led with her heart in creating Global Fest, bringing Joe’s Pub to the international market place, and is now doing the same at Lincoln Center. It is beyond a privilege to honor Tom and Shanta with Waterwell’s inaugural ‘Artist as Citizen’ award.”

The evening will include performances by Waterwell artistic alum, students, and friends, highlighting key Waterwell productions from the last 20 years. Along with a silent auction, a live auction will be held to culminate the evening, featuring exciting experiences with Succession cast members, Broadway stars, and more to be announced in the coming weeks.

This 20-year milestone is an enormous accomplishment, illustrating the steadfast and tenacious way that the founders Arian Moayed and Tom Ridgely built the organization’s foundation. Now under the leadership of Lee Sunday Evans, Heather Lanza, and Sarah Scafidi, the company has had the strength to evolve its programming while staying true to the core of the original mission and vision. Waterwell began as an ensemble-driven company of actors, writers, and directors who devised original productions that were known for their visceral, bold creativity. Ten years after its founding, Waterwell’s co-leaders made a radical decision to take on running a year-round theater education program at a NYC public school, the Professional Performing Art School. This was a daring and somewhat unexpected decision, but it reflected the depth of Ridgely and Moayed’s commitment to theater as a tool for youth development and real community building. Though it meant taking a short hiatus from making professional productions, it turned out to be one of the best choices they ever made. The program’s alumni have gone on to study at Yale and Juilliard, have had robust professional careers in the arts as well as politics, nursing, and many other fields. Heather Lanza is in her 7th year of leading the Education program, during which the curriculum has undergone rigorous evolution to ensure that it’s aligned with best industry practices for artistic excellence, while meaningfully engaging students in their Artist as Citizen practice.

The company returned to producing in 2017 with two ambitious productions - a bilingual English-Farsi Hamlet and a resurrection of WWII era musicals Blueprint Specials which was performed on the deck of the USS Intrepid. Under the leadership of two-time Obie Award winner Lee Sunday Evans who was appointed Artistic Director at the end of 2018, Waterwell has strengthened its unique approach to audience-building and produced projects in ways inspired by the principles of community organizing. Her first production for the company, created with Moayed, was the critically-acclaimed The Courtroom: a re-enactment of one woman’s deportation proceeding which was adapted into a feature-length film after its sold out run in active courtrooms around NYC. The company has continued to create new projects about immigration in close collaboration with a range of partner organizations - narrative interventions that bolster the work of organizers, building grassroots power for legislation and policy change. This season, Waterwell produced the world premiere of A Good Day To Me Not To You, written and performed by Palestinian-American artist Lameece Issaq. The show was hailed as "a wryly candid confessional" by The New York Times and The New Yorker raved that "the show, brimming with jokes, also goes deep, looking past the smile to find the skull beneath.”

For more information about the 20th Anniversary Party on February 12th, as well as table and ticket information go to waterwell20thparty.funraise.org. Single tickets start at $300, with tables ranging from $5,000 to $20,000.

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