The Rural We: Amy Brentano
The booming village of West Stockbridge, Mass. can now claim another performing arts venue thanks to Amy Brentano, a theater artist who recently purchased a building and renamed it The Foundry. She is happily welcoming Bazaar Productions, a 12-year-old nonprofit theater company taking up residence there. Brentano’s end goal is to combine “community programming with professionalism.”
I got my theater degree from NYU, and then stayed in New York for a long time. We moved up here about 18 years ago. My husband has a garden design and stonework business; he had some clients up here and his parents lived here. We‘ve lived in Richmond all this time.
I’ve been a teaching artist at WAM, a film and theater director at Berkshire Country Day School, and have taught in Richmond schools and directed their plays for the last 12 years. I met Sara Katzoff [co-artistic director] from Bazaar Productions about four years ago, when I did a workshop with them. I ended up in it, and found my artistic home in the Berkshires with that theater company. But I’ve always wanted to have a space for emerging new work, and I’ve been looking for the right place for the past five or six years.
We’ve had to do a lot of renovations to turn the building, a former glass factory and then art gallery, into a black box theater. The gallery space serves as a lobby, with a bar in the back — we just got our liquor license — and there’s outdoor space that faces the river. We have quite a bit of property right in the middle of downtown West Stockbridge; in fact, the West Stockbridge farmers market is on our property.
My mission is to create a space that can serve as a safe place to create dangerous work, work that’s relevant and challenging, with diverse artists for a diverse audience. And work that’s accessible and affordable. Bazaar Productions raised money so they could be a tenant in the building. It was a successful fundraising campaign. Allison Janney was part of it and she did a video for us. She and I were in a theater company in New York for 10 years, and we’ve all remained really good friends. More important than Allison’s matching donation was her endorsement; she’s got a huge fan base and we even got a large donation from a fan in Australia.
Bazaar Productions will present “Particularly in the Heartland” in August, and they’re also going to be working on a rock opera in collaboration with Pittsfield’s Manos Unidas Multicultural Educational Cooperative. The playwright will be coming in from San Francisco to do a 10-day residence with a group of artists, the dramaturg and musical director. Bazaar Productions will be bringing back their Berkshire Fringe Festival in 2020 — we’re really looking forward to that.
I purchased the building as a for-profit venture in the hopes that it can support nonprofits that align with my mission. There are a lot of unheard voices in the Berkshires, and I want to give them a platform to be heard.
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