Our history, written by Emily Rainbow Davis:

Every year on my birthday, I take myself through a process based on Best Year Yet. I do my own condensed version, which boils down to making a list of accomplishments, a list of disappointments, a list of what I learned, setting some goals and then distilling it all into a motto for the coming year.

As my theatre company approaches its 25th birthday, I’ve been struggling with how to celebrate it. I have it on good authority that a 25th anniversary is a golden opportunity to have a gala, to throw a fundraising extravaganza and generally make a large to-do. I explored this option but having never thrown a gala in our twenty-five years of theatre making, it doesn’t come naturally to us.

What does come naturally is reflection and introspection, so I will do that and if I happen to encounter someone who can gracefully throw us a gala on the way, I’m all for it. Meanwhile, as our birthday approaches, I will look at these last twenty-five years.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

We began. Agathe and Shannon and I decided to produce a show, rubbed the statue’s belly in the garden of Yaffa Café and raised enough money to produce Persephone at One Arm Red in DUMBO, Brooklyn. (RIP One Arm Red) And then we did it. It felt like such a thrilling accomplishment that I thought if I died immediately after, I’d be satisfied. It was a special time. We had an incredible team of designers, extraordinary actors, talented musicians and an A+ good time. So we did it again in the NY Fringe at Henry St Settlement. (RIP Fringe NYC, RIP Andy Neiman) We were sure we were headed straight to Broadway, given the reception we received.

That summer, before we returned to The Fringe, I drove up and down the East Coast, looking for a place we should move. We’d come up with this contest where a community could “Win a Theatre Company” so we explored some likely contestants. But New York City won that contest without even entering.

We joined ART NY, got our first grant and produced our next show, The Golden Apple: For the Fairest, at the Kraine Theatre in the East Village. With a cast of twelve, masks and puppets, it was an ambitious bit of work but yielded some warm responses. (RIP Myles Goldin, JoJo Hristova and Christopher Thomasson)

We made some short works, some puppet shows, got ourselves on CNN with the Lysistrata Project and produced a couple of myth festivals, where we solicited plays and performances and designed many evenings where stories and different forms could talk to each other. It had the quality of a mythic variety show – magicians, singer-songwriters, clowns and playwrights, all side by side. Some of those artists went on to win Tonys and run big fancy theatres. For us, it was a fun opportunity to work with other artists and see multiple takes on similar stories.

By our third year, we decided to get strategic and made it our special mission to get into the New York Times. (We were specifically told NOT to do this in a marketing class – but that class happened after we’d already done it so…too late!) To achieve this goal, we made our first show specifically for children (Baba Yaga) and performed it first in NYC, then in the Canadian Fringe and finally in an outdoor tour as part of a festival called Play Outside. And yes, we did get a review in the New York Times – in the children’s section, sure, but we did it. That pull quote is ours and we will have it forever.

Our next big project was devised (before people had a label for devising). We got actors together, did some workshops with young people and played with the mythology of money, exploring the stories and the magic we attribute to currency. In the process, we realized it wanted to be a musical and before long we had The Great God Money ready for Fringe NYC. (The show has subsequently been performed by Dreamcatcher Repertory and The International School of South Korea.)

Then I went to California for my MFA, so we co-produced my shows out there, putting Messenger touches into that work. Hecuba’s mask, in Macbeth, for example was created by Shannon Harvey and fig. a: The Heart followed a similar model as The Great God Money, in that it explored the mythology of a concept.

Back in NYC, we co-produced Courtney Cunningham’s Burden of Poof, which she subsequently toured to Fringes in London, Ottawa, Orlando, Winnipeg and Hollywood, as well as the Clown Festival at The Brick.

We began work on Mythellaneous, a clown hero’s journey. Devised with Bethany Burgess – Smith and further developed with Eva Burgess, Mythellaneous was shepherded by two un-related Burgesses! We took it to Edinburgh and remounted it at Manhattan Theatre Source. (RIP Manhattan Theatre Source)

We created a mini clown show called "The Last American Cowboy", to capture the mythology of the American West and we performed it at Manhattan Theatre Source and Ohio Theatre. (RIP Ohio Theatre)

Oh, and we joined The Puppet Lab at St Ann’s Warehouse and created a puppet show called "Seeing Inside" set under the skirt of Lou Andreas Salome. Doing our show in one of the most prestigious theatres in the city felt like a big milestone. (RIP Puppet Lab) We toured this little jewel box show to the Figment Festival and The Lost Circus.

We continued to devise, but with Shakespeare’s text, for As We Like It, created with Sara Zimmerman which we took to the Chicago and Delaware Fringe Festivals. When Sara moved back to the West Coast, we brought in Emily Hartford and with Eva Burgess’ direction, we produced a run at IATI Theater in 2013 and subsequently toured it to schools.

We also toured Very Serious Theatre to schools. This was a naïve mask project where we commissioned Roxana Ramseur to create some naïve (AKA larval) masks and got together a rotating group of actors to bring improvised shows to public spaces around NYC.

We got a SPARC grant to work at Lenox Hill Senior Center and produced an (almost) all senior citizen cast of Romeo and Juliet, which I’d been dreaming of doing for years. (We brought in Brooke Turner to be the Nurse and our prologue, Nora, brought along her small dog.)

The space grant we received at Flushing Town Hall allowed us to do Research and Development on a show based on the paintings of Remedios Varo. With the gift of theatrical space and storage we were able to explore ideas and design and character and staged the first half of the show that emerged from the experience. While we’ve never staged a full production of The Door Was Open, a middle school out in California did a workshop production and it sounded amazing!

We continued our experiments with text by staging a reading of a Measure for Measure. We were asking if it was possible to make a feminist version of this "problem play" of Shakespeare's. Ours was a bit of a bloodbath and a mighty good time to make.

We threw some surrealist parties and made surrealist puppet shows and happenings.

We shifted into audio in 2020, for obvious reasons, but we were already exploring the possibility. We made the first season of The Dragoning in 2020, made Season 2 in 2022 and Season 3 just last year. And this year we began the trend of getting into festivals (New Zealand, Toronto, Apulia and Cusco Webfests, as well as Aesthetica Film Festival) and winning awards! We won: Best Audio Series of All Genres at LA WebFest and Best Podcast – Grand Prize at Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival.

And we can’t forget our two projects that were provoked by the Dobbs decision! "The Church of the Holy Abortion" was selected for MujerFest at IATI Theater and “The Chip”, a standalone audio drama, was featured in the Atlanta Fringe Audio this year.

Our next project is Season 2 of The Defense, which we made the first season of in 2024.

When we first became a non-profit, we were often frustrated by the fact that so many opportunities would not be open to us until we’d been in existence for over five years. We understood that this was because most arts organizations don’t make it to five. We made it to five – five times over now. We are still here. Still making work. We have watched so many of our colleagues and compatriots fall by the wayside but we are still here. (RIP to so many companies, spaces and people.) The company is now almost as old as we were when we started it. We couldn’t have predicted any of it but sticking around through thick and thin (mostly thin) has been the largest accomplishment of all of them. Yaffa Café closed years ago so we can’t go rub that statue’s belly for luck anymore. We just make our own luck. Over and over. For 25 years.

And that’s the last 25 years! The Accomplishments!

And now:

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS

We have yet to figure out how to make all this sustainable. The truth is that it has become more challenging to make theatre, as time has gone on, not easier. We’ve never really found a large enough local audience to keep us afloat, which is part of the reason we turned to audio. Even before we started making audio dramas, we noticed that most interest in our work came from elsewhere. We want to be more in our community but we’ve just never really managed to draw big crowds. (On the internet, though, we’re at 23,000 all together!) We’re as much theatre outsiders as we have ever been but somehow have found a niche that allows us to be as international as we feel.

The big hope is that all of this, the awards, the selections and nominations, will serve to bring us back to our theatrical home. We just have to take the long way, I guess.

LEARNINGS

The fact that we started this in the face of destruction, almost in response to destruction, continues to be meaningful. We felt then that the opposite of destruction was creation - so the only thing to do when faced with devastating destruction was to create with our whole hearts. That continues to be true. And unfortunately, the destruction continues, though from a different angle now.

Still, still, though, the only answer to the brutal dismantling we see all around us, is to build our little corner of art. It is a lesson we learn over and over again. More destruction? More art. We don’t always have all the resources we need to make what we dream of but we make what we can with what we have. That’s what we’ve done from the start and that is how we continue.

GOALS

SHORT TERM

To produce Season Two of The Defense, recording live in a theatre with a full audience and more support than we’ve ever seen before

LONG VIEW

To get back to making plays. To finding a way to produce all that we dreamed of and all the shows we left along the wayside because it was not yet possible.

MOTTO

More destruction? More loss? More art.

Wanna help us keep going and make more art?

Happy 25th Birthday Messenger Theatre Company!