Our Vision.
The Williams Project is a national professional theatre ensemble, building ambitiously re-imagined productions of American plays. Our mission is to make theatrical excellence accessible to diverse and engaged audiences, while paying artists a living wage.
We create theatre that is:
Entertaining enough to make everyone feel welcome and part of a community;
Ambitious enough to risk humiliating failure;
Powerful enough to move people to love each other more, even in the face of the temporary nature of theatre and life.
We make theatre in a manner consistent with our belief that professional artists are vital to our culture and deserve to be compensated in a way that recognizes their value. Great theatre artists are working class heroes, who sacrifice greatly to make important work. We strive to pay artists living wages in order to support that work.
“If you're not paying artists a living wage, you are exploiting labor”
The Williams Project in CityArts:
Paying theater artists fair wages is hard. But why do we consider it optional? We need to talk about money.
“‘The longer that cycle [of underpayment] goes on, the harder it is to develop great actors,’ says Ryan Guzzo Purcell, artistic director of the relatively new company The Williams Project, who saw this pattern firsthand when he was the associate artistic director at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. ‘It makes rational people quit, it makes people who don’t have a ton of money to begin with quit, and it makes the ones who stick around really distracted. It’s that much harder for them to focus on doing a project. So without thinking too much about what it meant, I decided I wanted anything I did to be about living-wage artistry.’”
Dissolving barriers between the audience and the action
Artistic Director Ryan Guzzo Purcell in Crosscut:
In Georgetown, It’s a Nice Day for a Blood Wedding
“‘I always felt these great plays shouldn’t come across as academic, boring or old-fashioned. We want our company to look like America and Seattle and the work to be very accessible to different kinds of people.’
Immersion is not a gimmick with Purcell. It’s a credo. ‘I don’t believe you’re either doing high-quality theater or theater that’s accessible,” he says “I think the best theater happens when those two viewpoints are in conversation with one another.’”
