Waterwell was founded in Bloomington, Indiana by the company’s current leaders, Arian Moayed and Tom Ridgely. Their first collaboration, in 2001, was an adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies that incorporated mask work, puppetry, music and improvisation. Today Waterwell is an ensemble-based company devoted to the creation of new plays and new adaptations of classic texts.

The company develops its work through a unique process; it explores source texts to create entirely new pieces based only loosely on the originals. Director, writers, actors, composer, musicians and designers all collaborate over the course of an extended workshop period to generate new material, both textual and musical, to supplement and in some cases replace the original sources. While portions of the text are always preserved and retained, the artists re-imagine the pieces in entirely different contexts to maximize their resonance for contemporary audiences.

In Fuenteovejuna for example, which ran at the Duplex Cabaret Theater, that context naturally grew out of the Weimar-era cabaret tradition. For The Persians, a play about an empire in its waning, dissolute days, it was found in the classy and sophisticated – but ultimately doomed – nightclub entertainments of the 50s and 60s. And for Marco Millions, O’Neill’s 1928 warning against America’s peculiar form of industrial capitalism, the staging drew its inspiration from America’s peculiar form of contemporary theater, the vaudeville.

Juxtaposing these populist forms with classic plays creates unpredictable often exhilarating collisions. Waterwell also emphasizes live music and demanding physical/choreographic elements as well as longer preview periods, which give the productions more time in front of live audiences and the opportunity for Waterwell to achieve something central to its mission: accessibility.

The company’s strength in these efforts stems from the multiplicity – and diversity – of the ensemble’s perspectives. Artists born in Iran and the Turks & Caicos Islands; gay and lesbian artists; artists from California, Indiana, New York, Florida and Colorado; men, women; married, single; blacks, whites and browns are all represented in the twelve-person ensemble that make up the company’s core. Collectively and individually, it is their voices that will give Waterwell its unique aesthetic.

Each and every artist working is committed to creating politically aware, socially engaged new works for the theater and using it as way to address the day’s most pressing issues. The goal is always to fulfill the artist’s duty of returning the art to the source from which it sprung: the people.

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