PlayMakers Mobile is a relatively new initiative aimed at taking all the great theatre that we’re doing inside our amazing building and sharing it with our community. In many ways, this is not a new initiative at all. The very beginning of PlayMakers’ hundred-year history involved the company touring into North Carolina communities and in 2016, PlayMakers’ new Producing Artistic Director, Vivienne Benesch, decided it was time to take up that mantle again. “My impulse when I got here was that we needed to connect again with our communities,” she said. “We’ve grown the work that we’ve done here within the Joan H. Gillings Center for Dramatic Art and that’s wonderful, but we need to share what goes on here.”

“So 100 years later, we are getting back on the road and connecting with our communities again.”
Vivienne Benesch

Through partnerships with area non-profits, community organizations, and local schools and libraries, in locations across the Triangle, PlayMakers presents professional-quality, bare bones productions of Shakespeare plays and more, cut to ninety minutes or less. In doing so, we aim to connect with new audiences in their own spaces, truly meeting them where they live. By revealing theatre to be accessible, relevant, and vital, PlayMakers Mobile builds a new audience for these timeless plays and allows PlayMakers to foster new relationships throughout the region.

On Our Blog

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Mobile Shakespeare Comes to You

By Jerry Ruiz. Since I arrived here at PlayMakers in August, one of my major projects has been launching our Mobile Shakespeare initiative. This pilot program follows in the tradition of the original Carolina Playmakers and takes inspiration from the incredibly impactful work of Michelle Hensley and her Minneapolis-based theater company, Ten Thousand Things.

90-minute total presentation time
70-minute production
10 minutes of pre- and post-show audience engagement activities

Minimal technical needs!

 
Do you want your community organization, school, or non-profit to be included on the PlayMakers Mobile tour? Contact PlayMakers’ Engagement Associate Jeri Lynn Schulke for more information: jschulke@email.unc.edu