Sheila is coming to the A.R.T./New York Theatres this winter, and The Associates need your support to give this play life. We are raising $12,000 of our $30,000 production budget through this campaign. Your donations will enable The Associates to pay our collaborators, hire a publicist to spread the word about our work, and build a world at the brink of nightmare through set, costume, sound, and light design.

The Play: Sheila
September 1987. The edge of town. Gloria opens her door to the woman she hasn’t seen since she disappeared from home ten years ago. Mary sees the face that has haunted her memories of childhood and dreams of womanhood. But the reflection that the women seek in each other is dimmed by the years of silence and distorted by the struggle for survival. How did they get here? Did one of them take a wrong turn, or were they driven apart?

Sheila pits two women against the world: not to conquer it, but to survive it. What chance do they have to decide the terms of their survival?

The People: The Associates Theater Ensemble

The Associates are five playwright-performers. We devise plays through a collective process of confession, confrontation, and dissent within the company. We create stories at the intersection of our personal nightmares, cultural taboos, and current political landscape, where differences among us become the engine of dramatic action. We aim to subvert the contract of theater, which ordinarily insulates audience from the world of the play, so that they can encounter sticky and strange ideas through new forms of dream logic and associative thinking.  

The Production: Premiering in January 2018!
After two years of development—including 350 hours of rehearsal, a company retreat to Holes In The Wall Collective, 100 audience members at our April workshop, and 3 talkbacks—we have completed the play, doffed our writers' hats, and jumped into rehearsal. Thanks to the Creative Space Grant and Rental Subsidy Fund through A.R.T./New York, we have always had a roof over our heads. Now we are setting out to furnish, light, and populate our theatrical home: the brand-new, state-of-the-art Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at 502 West 53rd Street!

We have assembled a crack team to make it happen:
Director: Jamal Abdunnasir
Producer: Casey Worthington
Set Designer: Brittany Vasta
Costume Designer: Isabelle Coler
Sound Designer: Emily Auciello
Light Designer: Vicki Bain & Tyler First
Stage Manager: Emily Fischer
Associate Producer: Stanley Bahorek
Cast: Peregrine Heard, Lauren LaRocca & Emily Stout

Sheila was devised by The Associates, in collaboration with Gina DeMay.

Where You Come In: Right Here!
Your contributions will make this production possible. How? On every level, from the talented people to the crucial bolts and screws.
$150 pays a crew member
$350 pays a designer
$500 covers our costume budget
$3500 builds our set ... we could go on!

We are thankful for donations from our longtime audience and friends, and we appreciate that your support takes many forms! One of the many ways you can lend us a hand is by letting your fellow theater-goers and -lovers know about our work. Thank you!

Why Sheila?
We feel the need for representation of women acutely. We wrote this play because we wanted to turn up the volume on the outrageous paradox of female existence in this country. Right now, people are making decisions about women’s health, women’s rights, women’s safety, and the representation of women at the highest level of government. Most of those people are men. And below the highest level of government, those same decisions have been determining women’s lives in pervasive, omnipresent, public, and private ways. 

Sheila tells the story of two women at the edge of town in the middle of the country. They do not stand for every woman, but they stand for the hungry women, the flawed, the deeply bonded friends, sisters, the disappointed professionals, the ones who strike out alone, the ones marooned in a home not of their choosing, the ones who struggle to make a home of their own. We are interested in whether women can ever claim agency—or whether in fact there is no escape from the patriarchy.

The Associates Theater Ensemble is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of The Associates Theater Ensemble must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.