MTC History
In the early 1970s, Lynn Rubright and Zaro Weil stepped into an improvisation workshop one Saturday morning based on the theater games of Viola Spolin. Now recognized as an iconic force in 20th century American theater, Spolin’s work would become the foundation of Second City in Chicago and define the very idea of what we now think of as “improv.” But when this workshop happened, her iconic book Improvisation for the Theater was barely 7 years old.
The exact location of the workshop is lost to history, but it was in a warehouse somewhere in the Central West End or Grand Center. Getting to the class each Saturday involved climbing fire escape stairs – colorful details that may come as no surprise, since at the time, these neighborhoods housed much of the city’s bohemia. The St. Louis Symphony had only just moved to Powell Hall a few years earlier; many other historic storefronts were still vacant – or threatened by demolition.
Lynn was a classroom teacher in the Kirkwood School District. Zaro had recently completed her degree at Webster College and was teaching theater there. Until the improv workshop, the two had never met.
Thank goodness for countless generations of young people in St. Louis and beyond that they did!
Soon, Lynn was welcoming Zaro to her classroom to use theater games as a way to teach. At the end of the school year, Zaro asked Lynn if she would consider leaving her job to start something brand new: a theater company that would use play as a means to teach. Lynn agreed to take the leap. So, over a dining room table in a long-since demolished farm house off Clayton Road, together with John Weil (who would become MTC’s first Executive Director), the company was named and Metro Theater Circus was born.
That dining room table would move to the Central West End, to the Weil’s home on Pershing Place, becoming where MTC artists would gather to plan the future. To have a place to rehearse, Zaro and John made a deal with New City School, which, at only 4 years old, had just moved into the former Mary Institute building where it still is housed today. At the time, only the first floor was in use for classrooms. So, in exchange for MTC’s early ensembles providing arts curriculum for the school’s 100+ students, MTC received a classroom on the second floor as their rehearsal studio. There, the company’s earliest ensemble-based shows – marrying theater, dance, improv, storytelling, music, clowning, and more – were born, through daily workshops and rehearsals: The Second Greatest Show on Earth, Alice in Wonderland, Rootabaga Vaudeville Show, Commedia Cartoon, and more.
Zaro led these rehearsals, carefully detailing each day’s activities in a notebook that was inseparable from her. From the start, artists were paid a modest fee. As they toured around the St. Louis region and beyond in a grey van, the ensemble would typically do as many as four shows in a day – and after each show, each ensemble member would visit a different classroom to lead young people in workshops based on what they had just seen. Occasionally, public performances of these tours would be offered, often in the early years at the new Edison Theater on the campus of Washington University.
While the ensemble created these magical plays, John, volunteering his time, would book the troupe to tour to each school. And soon, as an early board president, Anabeth Weil would ensure that there was community support for this burgeoning company to thrive.
MTC was young, scrappy, and hungry. And the country was quickly recognizing its unique impact. A year after its founding, the Children’s Theatre Association of America named MTC the country’s “Best New Children’s Theatre.” By 1978, MTC was taking its first tour to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. (The company would be invited back for countless productions over the decades.) Beloved children’s book writer Remy Charlip agreed to have some of his stories adapted by MTC (including Arm in Arm and Do You Love Me Still? Or Do You Love Me Moving?).
Soon, MTC’s next chapter would start. By 1980, Lynn had moved onto her next project, returning to her roots as an educator to transform curriculum with arts-based learning in the Kirkwood District, at Webster College, and as co-founder of the St. Louis Storytelling Festival. Zaro was preparing to move to Europe. And Carol North, a supremely talented young actress, who had been with the company as an ensemble member for four years, was asked to consider taking the helm to steer MTC into the future.
Carol became Artistic Director and James Evans, a professor at Webster University, succeeded John as Executive Director. Rita Washington, a beloved company member, shortly became General Manager. James would remain in his role for four years, expanding MTC’s administrative space to include both New City School and the College School. Other than a brief two-year period away in Europe, Carol would continue as Artistic Director until 2013.
It was musician and company member Larry Pressgrove who would steer the ship as Artistic Director during the two years Carol was abroad – succeeding for the first time in MTC history in bringing MTC’s operations all into one place, as MTC became one of the original companies in residence at COCA, as COCA concluded its second year of operations. In addition to touring and building classroom curriculum, MTC artists would provide theater-based learning programs for young people enrolled at COCA during this time.
Other changes came after the move to COCA and Carol’s return to St. Louis and MTC. Through a technical assistance grant from the Regional Arts Commission, MTC first met strategic consultant Ellen Livingston, who would later become a pivotal board chair. While the name “Circus” conjured the joy of MTC’s work, it had also become a source of confusion for some – especially as a new, true one-ring circus was starting up in St. Louis: Circus Flora. While the acronym would stay the same, MTC would now become Metro Theater Company. MTC would also further expand its educational footprint, providing direct training for future teachers, ensuring that kinesthetic learning and arts-based curriculum could be part of how future teachers understood their work and their impact on young people. Visionary educator and MTC board president Mary Ellen Finch would help MTC launch its first significant university partnership, in 1990 – a partnership that continues to this day.
MTC would also enter an era of expansive touring. With Nick Kryah’s percussive Beowulf (which toured for 3 seasons in its first run) and David Saar’s The Yellow Boat (which toured over 5 seasons), MTC would begin to reach states (and countries!) that MTC had never before visited. The Yellow Boat alone would enjoy a 5 week tour through the Hawaiian Islands. Tours to Italy’s Stregagetto Festival and the International Festival for Children in Taiwan would follow as well. Even as MTC became an ambassador for St. Louis to the world, its local footprint would continue to deepen through dedicated leadership of such board presidents as Janet Schoedinger and Dan Jay during this era.
As MTC entered its 25th season in 1998, through Dan Jay’s efforts, MTC at last came to have its own offices and studio space, after a decade of sharing space at COCA. MTC also had a new Managing Director, Joan Briccetti, formerly the General Manager of the St. Louis Symphony. Joan’s business acumen and community relationships propelled MTC forward and enabled the company to further diversify its programming model.
After decades of exclusively touring with occasional “sit down” public performances, by 2004 MTC would produce its first full run of a mainstage production, with Earth Songs by José Cruz González, in the brand new Lee Auditorium at the Missouri History Museum, a relationship brokered in part by board member Marcia Kerz. Mainstage productions allowed MTC to produce work that no longer had to be designed to fit in a touring van – creating space for sizeable sets and casts of enormous scale. Earth Songs included dozens of performers, including a few faces only previously seen “behind the scenes” like Joan and Janet, in the beloved “chorus of rocks.”
While MTC would continue to partner with the Missouri History Museum and many other venues in the region for performances for two decades, in 2007, MTC would return to one of its earliest local homes, the Edison Theater, as part of their Ovations Series with bi-annual productions of iconic titles, including Hana’s Suitcase, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Giver, and Jackie & Me. Now, young people would have multiple ways to experience MTC’s work: at school assemblies, through classroom workshops, on field trips, with their families, or through ever-expanding education programs.
For, at the same time, MTC expanded its staff to welcome its first full-time Education Director, Joni Doyle, a member of the company’s ensemble since the early 1980s. After Joni’s leadership expanded the footprint of MTC’s education offerings beyond classroom workshops and professional development for teachers, Emily Kohring stepped into the role – ultimately joining Nick Kryah as an Associate Artist as well after a year in the position. Under Emily’s leadership, the social justice component of MTC’s work, which had always been a critical thread in programming decisions, was given dedicated care and attention. Through partnerships with districts and classroom teachers, MTC began offering deep on-going curricular residencies, which would evolve into the signature programs Building Community Through Drama and Say Something, Do Something, as well as camps throughout the summer. A teaching artist fellowship was created to train future teaching artists through hands-on experience. There wasn’t a day of the semester when MTC’s education staff wasn’t present in a classroom across the region – which is still true today!
As Carol and Nick prepared for their retirement in the early 2010s, they looked to set the stage for MTC’s next chapter to thrive. Board president Kevin Farrell helped lead a search to ensure that MTC’s future home could meet its ever-expanding footprint. With generous support from Ken Kranzberg, who took on ownership of a former commercial space on Washington to become MTC’s landlord, MTC came to its current home at 3311 Washington. And, as the Kranzbergs renovated the Grandel Theatre, MTC came to make that venue its primary mainstage performance venue, as the Grandel’s first resident theater company after its renovation.
Guiding these facility and leadership transitions was board president Susan Gamble, who also led the search process which welcomed Julia Flood to become the company’s current Artistic Director in 2014. Two and a half years before Julia’s arrival, Karen Weberman Bain succeeded Emily as Education Director and took on the charge of continuing and deepening our well-established education programs. In 2019, MTC welcomed MTC’s current Managing Director Joe Gfaller as well.
During this most recent chapter in MTC’s history, the company has continued its commitment to new work, partnering with writers like Idris Goodwin, Eric Coble, Mariah Richardson, and Guinevere Govea to bring major mainstage programs and tours to the stage. It has also deepened its relationships with schools across the region, as Say Something, Do Something has flourished through support from both the ReCAST and National Endowment for the Arts Research in the Arts programs, leading to research that shows the meaningful impact it has made in changing attitudes about violence and conflict resolution in young people.
In the face of the pandemic shut downs, MTC met the moment with grace and grit – maintaining its commitment to serve young people, even during extremely challenging times. With the Learning Through Play in the Arts video series, new, daily arts-integrated curriculum was made available to teachers and parents worldwide as the shut downs began. By streaming productions and special events, MTC could connect young people to the arts wherever they lived – with audiences booking tickets from as far away as Australia and New Zealand. This momentum carried MTC through to a return to live audiences – becoming the first professional theater to safely resume full runs of live performances with the bilingual The Very Hungry Caterpillar Show / La Oruga Muy Hambrienta Espectaculo in an outdoor production in spring 2021.
Today, MTC looks ahead to its future from a place of gratitude and hope – gratitude for how far we have come thanks to the commitment and talent of so many before us, and hope for where that wind at our backs can take us in the years to come. Already, we have begun our Every Child Initiative, a commitment to ensure that every child in the St. Louis region is impacted by at least one of our programs at least once during their childhood between our 50th and 60th seasons – with a commitment to ensure that many receive multiple touchpoints throughout the decade to come. With a new partnership with St. Louis County Children’s Service Fund, both Building Community Through Drama and Say Something, Do Something will be embedded into districts across St. Louis County to help evolve the culture within our region’s schools, both surrounding the arts and young people’s self-efficacy to make a difference in the lives of one another. And in the fall of 2023, we will provide our region a gift of gratitude, in the form of a two-day free family festival in Grand Center for all to enjoy.
It has been an amazing first 50 years. And we’re just getting started!