The Rural We: Andrea Rhodes
Andrea Rhodes is the producing director for Tangent Theatre in Tivoli, New York, and the marketing director at Gig Marketing. Tangent might be a little theater company but it made a big splash in Tivoli in its first few years after moving up from the city. Now, after taking some time off, Tangent is back, staging their next reading Sunday, Nov. 17, at 5:30 p.m. They will present "Chinese Coffee" by Ira Lewis, with Michael Rhodes and Keith Teller, at The Carpenter Shop Theater, 60 Broadway, Tivoli, N.Y. $5 suggested donation / limited space, rsvp: info@tangent-arts.org
I grew up in LaGrange and my husband Michael is from Poughkeepsie. We met in Rhinebeck at a wedding. He was an actor and in the early '90s I moved back to NYC with him and we were there for many years.
Michael was a part of a theater company in Poughkeepsie. We brought them our presentation of “Waiting for Godot” and produced it on the Lower East Side and it was a success. We looked at each other and thought, we lived through it, we’re all still friends, maybe we can start a theater company.
So we started the company in 2000 in the city. Michael is the producer/actor/director and I do all the behind the scenes. We produced main stage plays and then we started doing pub readings after going to Ireland for the first time in 2006.
We moved to Tivoli in 2009. It was not on our radar. In 2006 we went to see a production of, again, “Waiting for Godot” at the Fisher Center and came into Tivoli for dinner, and it was love at first sight. It was a gorgeous fall day and something really clicked.
So we figured out how to migrate the company here. We knew people, so we could get things started. There’s an Irish pub here, Traghaven, and we asked the owner if we could do pub readings and he said "Of course. Tivoli needs something like this."
So we started slow and steady. The readings are free, script in hand, and we do established and new works. They became very popular very quickly.
We often read plays we don’t produce. It gives us and the audience a chance to experience a play they maybe haven’t heard of before. Something that really charms us is people telling us it really turned them on to theater.
We acquired our space in 2011. It was a carpenter's shop. The theater is a blank canvas we can mold to our designs. It’s fifty seats and it is the most intimate theater experience you will have in the Hudson Valley.
We like to produce a show in the spring and we have a new plays festival that we started, called NEWvember. Last time we did it we had over 500 plays submitted. It’s a great way to present new work. Our goal is to produce one of the plays that comes out of the festival.
Since 2017 we’ve been on a bit of a pause but we are now getting our feet back on the ground. Tivoli has this amazing art scene and we think theater is really important to that. I think we have a great niche here and we have a great opportunity to grow.
I think a lot of people really missed Tangent and yearned for it to be back. We are really delighted and pleased that that energy is still there.
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