IRT—the 2010S 2020S

Education had always been a cornerstone of the Indiana Repertory Theatre and long focused primarily on adults and on students in middle school and high school. That changed in 2014, when the Theatre launched the Exploring Stages project, designed to reach children ages three to eight. Children and their accompanying adults were invited to settle onto the floor of the Cabaret space, where lively presentations encouraged audience participation.

As its contribution to the Indiana Bicentennial celebration in 2016, the Theatre presented Finding Home: Indiana at 200, an anthology of scenes, monologues, poems, and songs written by thirty different Hoosier authors, woven together with original music. It was conceived as a single play, but with a wealth of material, FindingHome evolved into two different productions, christened Gold and Blue for the colors in the state flag. This one-of-akind production then received additional viewing with the collaboration of public television station WFYI, which both broadcast the production and memorialized it in DVD form, allowing the Theatre to place a copy in every public library in the state.

The 2017 production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttimewas notable for the casting of an actor on the autism spectrum, Mickey Rowe, to portray the main character, who is on the spectrum. Rowe and IRT received national media coverage for his work and for the casting decision, which illustrated the Theatre’s ongoing commitment to inclusion.