A West Campus theater company received a $4.5 million investment last month to fund the construction of a new theater in northeast Austin.
The investment is part of the Austin Economic Development Corporation’s (AEDC) Cultural Trust, which supports arts and music venues across the city, including Hole in the Wall last year. The Austin Playhouse applied for funding in March 2022, said Anne Gatling Haynes, the AEDC’s chief transactions officer, in an email.
The Austin Playhouse found an interim home in University Baptist Church’s auxiliary building on 22nd Street in 2021.
“It’s been a fantastic interim facility,” said Associate Artistic Director Ben Wolfe. “We’ll be here for our 25th season, which starts in September. It looks like we’ll be here for one more season beyond that while we continue to fundraise.”
The company previously maintained a space at Penn Field in south Austin but lost its space in 2011 following a rise in rent prices. Wolfe said that the Playhouse purchased land in 2019 for the new theater in northeast Austin along U.S. 183. The company initially expected to start construction in 2020, but the pandemic made the project too expensive.
“We just needed to fill the fundraising gap,” Wolfe said. “Because we were so far along in that process, that moved us up on the list in the eyes of AEDC. We had the infrastructure in place. We needed the funds to complete the building.”
The company expects to break ground on the new facility in 2025. According to a press release, the project has an estimated cost of $7.5 million, so Wolfe said the Playhouse started a fundraising campaign to raise the remainder of the development costs.
According to Wolfe, Playhouse’s biggest challenge is maintaining a robust subscriber base every time it moves spaces. He said the Playhouse had 2,000 subscribers in its final season in a space at Austin Community College–Highland.
“Not all of the audience would follow us,” Wolfe said. “Anytime we had to move was reestablishing ourselves … and then rebuilding that audience base back up.”
The Playhouse’s move to West Campus has introduced a new audience demographic for the company to cater to.
“We’ve seen a large uptick in a younger demographic,” Wolfe said. “(We started) pick-your-price Thursdays, and Thursdays have become one of our biggest selling nights, particularly within the student crowd.”
Khalia Sacko, a theater and dance sophomore, is one of the many UT students who has frequented the theater. After he saw “Nightbird” by R. Eric Thomas at the Playhouse last year, he recalled that the theater in West Campus has a “nice nostalgia about it.”
“It gives you that artsy vibe you want when you go into a theater,” Sacko said. “It’s not a huge space, but it’s an intimate space. There was an art gallery across the way from where the performance was being made.”
The cultural trust also helped theater professor Madge Darlington, who co-founded Austin theater collective Rude Mechs. Her organization received $2 million to outfit a space owned by the city for a new theater after the collective lost its permanent home to high rents in 2017.
“There’s a lot of regional theaters (and) small experimental theaters,” Darlington said. “Austin’s really known, especially since the 1990s, for the amount of new work that’s created here. We’re at danger of losing that if the city doesn’t step in. The thing that attracted people here is going to die if we don’t nurture it.”
