In the beginning of the Untethered Theatre Project is the word.
Rather than starting a new theatrical company with oversized ambitions and full-scale productions, a quartet of Atlanta theater makers decided instead to begin a new stage endeavor by starting small with a series of three staged play readings at Spalding Nix Fine Art gallery.
“For us, it was more important to tell really good stories as simply as we could, with some new faces, and let the text and the experience of the word shine this first year,” said Clifton Guterman, one of the co-founders.
The reason the project is called Untethered, he said, was because it’s not affiliated with any other Atlanta theater nor tied to any existing stage. It isn’t in competition with existing theaters either.
Guterman, Patti Siegel, Jeff Hathcoat and Courtney Moors began discussing the effort in spring 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic had shut down most theater around the nation.
“In the thick of the pandemic, it felt like we were on pause,” Moors said. “There was only so much you could do creatively to be able to connect with people. This project was an opportunity to build something when nothing was happening.”
For the first reading, in May, the group presented J.B. Priestley’s classic An Inspector Calls in front of an intimate capacity audience of nearly 50. Directed by Amelia Fischer, actors — including Hathcoat and Moors — performed with scripts in hand, yet they also appeared in costume, used some props and employed some movement.
The second sold-out reading, Samuel Hunter’s A Great Wilderness directed by Guterman, takes place Monday night at the gallery. Set in present day at a gay conversion camp, the script centers on Walt, the camp’s retiring leader, when the last boy in his charge goes missing.
Untethered’s four co-founders have had a variety of involvements with professional Atlanta theaters.
Guterman works as a casting director and acting coach, yet he’s been active in Atlanta theater as a performer, director and artistic associate at theaters including Theatrical Outfit, Actor’s Express and the Alliance since 2001. Siegel, the executive director of ArtsATL, has served on the boards of Theatrical Outfit and Synchronicity Theatre.
Hathcoat, Siegel’s son, and Moors met after moving to Atlanta from New York in 2018 and appearing together in Nell Gwynn at Synchronicity Theatre. They met at a fitting where they were both trying on dresses, Hathcoat said, because his character was a Restoration-era stage performer known for female roles. Their friendship grew when they realized they had similar working styles and taste.
Then, the pandemic hit.
“It was an unfortunate series of events for me and Courtney,” Hathcoat said. “I felt like I was just getting started, and things were on a roll. Then, suddenly, everyone was ordered to go inside. We wondered how to start over when we weren’t in front of people. How can we get our fresh faces to Atlanta out there and bring along other fresh faces?”
Siegel said the project’s key mission is to introduce new talent to Atlanta audiences.
“Several months back, Clifton reached out to me at the same time I was having conversations with Jeff and Courtney about producing,” Siegel said. “Because they, frankly, are the mission. They are New York actors who have not had the opportunity to get firmly established in Atlanta, mostly because they got here as the world shut down.”
Staging the works with an assist from gallerist Spalding Nix has been a blessing, Siegel said.
“He loves that we’ve got performing arts fans coming into a visual arts space,” she said. “It’s a nice intersection.”
Moors said she was encouraged by the possibility of the project during the pandemic.
“It was a refreshing feeling to know that, when things come back, we don’t have to do them the way they’ve always been done,” she said. “We don’t have to have the same cast of faces you always see. We can start fresh and feature some scripts that haven’t been produced in this area.”
Guterman’s casting background also positioned him to tap new, diverse talent to participate in the readings because he believes that casts should reflect the community. For A Great Wilderness, a play he has liked for years, he filled roles with many performers from the LGBTQ+ community to give added weight to the script. He also hired Ian Meadows, a 13-year-old performer he met at Catapult Acting Studios, to play the missing camper, rather than putting an adult performer who looks young in the part.
During a rehearsal this past weekend, actors read the script together for the first time. With books in hand, they became emotional as they worked through the lines.
Playing a ranger, Gara Coffey was moved to tears during one monologue her character had to deliver, where the character said something complimentary to the conversion camp leader Walt, played by Charles Green, which was contrary to how the performer herself feels about the practice.
“I wasn’t sure that it would happen as I read through the play on my own, but it hit me while I was reading it with others,” she said. “Let me get this emotion out now.”
Michelle Rivera, playing the missing boy’s mother, said she regularly looked to Meadows while reading her part to connect emotionally with her role.
“I love this process because it’s about staying open to everything that everyone is giving you,” she said. “It’s about connection. For me, being a mom helps a lot. I feel my character’s pain.”
Selecting scripts for the reading series was a collaborative process among the co-founders, and they ended up with Inspector set in the past, and Wilderness set in the present. The third script, C.A. Johnson’s Thirst, to be directed by Cynthia D. Barker on September 19, takes place in a dystopian future.
“The more we got it down to the three we’re at, we really wanted to have a thematic throughline,” Siegel said. “Coming out of the pandemic, it was really important to us that we reinforce to the audience that, now more than ever, if we’re going to survive as humankind, we have to take care of each other.”
Future productions from Untethered Theatre Project have yet to be determined. The co-founders are open to growth, yet the process of staging readings has been rewarding on its own.
“What I’ve loved about what we’ve done is just meeting new folks,” Siegel said. “It’s been gratifying to me. We have some Atlanta veterans, yet we have new faces. I’m excited to see the breadth of [talent] we’re able to introduce audiences to through our readings.”
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Benjamin Carr, a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, is an arts journalist and critic who has contributed to ArtsATL since 2019. His plays have been produced at The Vineyard Theatre in Manhattan, as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and the Center for Puppetry Arts. His novel Impacted was published by The Story Plant in 2021.
