Organizational Overview:
PlayMakers Repertory Company is the professional theatre in residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Considered the leading theatre of the Carolinas, the company has been honored by the Drama League of New York as one of the best regional theatres in the country.
PlayMakers’ home is the 55,000 square foot Center for Dramatic Art which houses two theatres, a rehearsal hall, production shops, studios, classrooms and administrative offices. Between September and April each year the theatre produces a Mainstage season in the 500 seat Paul Green Theatre and a second stage series called PRC2 in the 265 seat Elizabeth Price Kenan Theatre.
Known for fresh exploration of the classics, as well as the best of the modern stage, PlayMakers’ Mainstage season includes work from the American and European canon by playwrights such as Shakespeare, Molière, Beckett, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, as well as plays from the finest contemporary writers such as August Wilson, Tom Stoppard, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, and Dael Orlandersmith.
The PRC2 series features productions that are a springboard to community dialogue. This series explores socially and politically relevant topics with in-depth audience discussion after each performance led by experts and thinkers from the Triangle’s rich intellectual and artistic community.
Our Education and Outreach programs have served over 100,000 area youth since their inception in 1984. These programs are designed to bring students to specially produced weekday matinees of our productions and to send Teaching Artists into the classrooms of surrounding schools, particularly those without access to quality arts programs. In 2007, PlayMakers inaugurated the Summer Youth Conservatory in which 40+ young theatre artists, ages 9-18, spend five weeks training with professionals in acting, text, movement, voice, and technical theatre. The Conservatory culminates in professionally produced public performances of a play or musical in the Paul Green Theatre.
Producing Artistic Director Joseph Haj began his leadership of PlayMakers in 2006. He is a graduate of UNC’s Professional Actor Training Program and has had a successful acting and directing career in theatre, television and film. In 2009, American Theatre magazine named Haj one of 25 artists who will have a significant impact on the American theatre over the next quarter-century. Under Haj’s direction, PlayMakers has reinvigorated and doubled its programming, which has resulted in audience growth, critical acclaim, financial stability and a renewed relationship with the local community, as well as the national theatre scene.
PlayMakers creates its work through a unique combination of resident company members, guest artists, professional staff, and graduate students enrolled in UNC’s Department of Dramatic Art MFA programs in Acting, Technical Production, and Costume Production. The undergraduate students have the opportunity to work with PlayMakers as run crew, in production, and occasionally on the stage.
Carolina has a long and rich theatrical history with over 90 years of playmaking at UNC. In 1918 Professor Frederick Koch founded the campus theatre group known as the Carolina Playmakers. He also began teaching course study in the theatre arts that year which led to the establishment of the second oldest drama department in the country, which has trained such artists as Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green, Andy Griffith, Louise Fletcher, and more recently Billy Crudup and Michael Cumpsty. Beginning in 1923, Playmakers performances took place in the Greek Revival building now known as Historic Playmakers Theater, in the heart of the UNC campus. The Carolina Playmakers thrived and by 1975 was re-organized as a professional LORT theatre under the name PlayMakers Repertory Company, and moved to its current location in the Center for Dramatic Art.
PlayMakers is proud of its close relationship to the University and Triangle communities. PlayMakers is supported with funding from UNC-Chapel Hill, ticket sales, donations from individuals, local and national foundations and corporations, as well as public funding sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Orange County Arts Commission.