Women's Theatre Project 2012 Season Press Release

The Women's Theatre Project is a company of professional female theatre artists dedicated to producing theatrical works exploring the female voice. The company was founded from a need for women's voices to be heard, a desire to break down the stereotypes of women propelled by the media, and to create more professional theatrical opportunities for women of all shapes, sizes, races, and ages. 
 
Over the last 10 years, we have worked diligently to bring a unique theatre experience to audiences in our region. While it is never easy to develop a theatre company, the last several years have brought many challenges to our organization. With the decline of the economy, we have seen grant funding reduced year after year. Fortunately, we witnessed an incredible level of support from our audience, who contributed donations that supported and sustained our work when the grant money fell short. We also had the benefit of finding constancy from our major corporate sponsor, Sixth Star. To Doug Jones and Sixth Star, we are truly grateful.

As we look to 2012 and beyond, we face more challenges that we are working to resolve. The theatre space at Sixth Star will be converted into offices in March, which means we will no longer be presenting productions in that venue. We have been working with other venues in Broward County to secure performance space but the right opportunity has not presented itself, as of yet. In addition, we are registered in Broward County as a not-for-profit and our major source of funding comes from the Broward Cultural Division. Understandably, we are obliged to perform in our home county to receive this funding. This places us in the precarious position of not being able to secure grants for future work because we do not have an identified location for presentation. This scenario dictates that we cannot sell a season, which also impacts our revenues to fund productions.

We feel the only way to move forward at this point in time is to postpone our plans for a full 2012 season. We will, instead, channel our efforts on Girl Play 2012, because the nature of the festival program provides us with the portability we require at this stage in our development. If you are not familiar with Girl Play, it is a short play competition and festival. We receive hundreds of submissions from around the globe for this program that has become a strong outreach program for TWTP.

This news is difficult to share and comes from a company that has faithfully delivered every production on time and on schedule (and under some dire circumstances).

Our subscribers were contacted individually on behalf of our Board of Directors and have already been refunded their subscriptions purchased for the 2012 season.

We will remain in touch with you on updates or changes as they arise and this information will be posted on our website, as well. We look forward to sharing good news with you in the near future.

Sincerely,
Meredith Lasher
President

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