Sound Theatre Company

Website: https://soundtheatrecompany.org/

Budget Size: Between 100 and 500k

Region: Northwest

County: King

Population Centered: People with Disabilities

Mission Statement: To empower artists to give voice to the dignity and diversity of the human experience, moving audiences toward a more just and compassionate world.

Community Accelerator Grant Award: $25,000.00

Primary Impact Category: The Future

“It’s been like building the plane while you’re flying the plane,” says Sound Theatre Company’s Co-Artistic Director, Shermona Mitchell. She’s talking about the experience of producing the world premiere of Autocorrect Thinks I’m Dead, a bilingual ASL and spoken English horror comedy play, but she could be touching on any number of projects Sound has undertaken. When Sound was founded in 2006, the company’s mission was centered around language and music as modes of political and artistic expression – but over the years, the team found themselves thinking and talking more and more about the importance of diverse representation in terms of social justice, racial justice, and disability justice. In 2016, they revised their mission, and, says founder and Co-Artistic Director Teresa Thurman, “basically opened up a door to something limitless in terms of recognizing the unique diversity of every individual and the communities to which they belong. We just knew how much we wanted to tell those stories.”

Since that revision, Sound has grown in leaps and bounds. In 2019, it brought on its first paid staff members. By 2021, the entire staff (a number that fluctuates between 6.5 FTE year-round and 12 when a show is up and running) was on the payroll. “I consider Sound an organization that’s in a squeeze space,” Teresa says. “Our artists are paid now, our staff is paid, but nobody is paid a living wage yet, and the demands of what it means to be offering pay – in terms of human resources, accounting needs, people’s expectations in wanting to plan their futures and their careers – have gone up enormously.” Sound is navigating that space with as much grace as it can, but Teresa and Shermona are certainly concerned about whether external funding will be there to support its ongoing growth. The entirety of their Community Accelerator Grant award has gone towards meeting payroll in a timely manner – a critical need this year, as another major grant Sound was awarded last year and built into their 2023 budget was disbursed far later than the team anticipated. “This funding has helped us build trust with our staff and prove ourselves to be a secure place for them to work,” says Teresa, “which is huge. We want to be worthy of their long-term commitment.”

Autocorrect Thinks I’m Dead, which ran this September, marks the first time a play with a majority-Deaf and Hard of Hearing cast and creative team has been produced by a hearing theatre company in Seattle. Shermona and Teresa were inspired to program it for 2023 after several Sound productions featuring Deaf actors, including ASL Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2018 and Peeling in 2019. “We believed we had the cultural awareness and cultural competency to take this on,” Teresa says, “but we’re certainly still learning a lot and still continuing to grow.” One of the unanticipated challenges they ran into was the pressure of finding the right way to caption the show. “There’s an industry standard for captions in film, but that doesn’t exist yet in theatre,” says Shermona. “As we were trying to design ours, we were thinking about the legacy of the decisions we were making. ‘What is going to serve the industry as a whole? Are we the ones creating the standard now?’ And that’s exciting and terrifying, because, you know, how much of it is genius and how much of it is you just trying to fly the plane?”

As Sound continues to pioneer new models of theatremaking, they’re learning how to make the most of uncertainty – and how to hold on to the worthwhile lessons they’ve learned. One decision the team made for Autocorrect, which sounds simple, was in fact quite revolutionary: making all access needs, including ramps, audio descriptions, and accommodations for Blind/Deaf patrons, available for the whole run of the show. “People running theaters tend to say, ‘You can come on this day, because this is when we’re ready for you,’ not ‘We’ve made this for you, come whenever you want,” says Shermona. “That’s a lesson that clicked for me with this show: Everyone should be able to go to the theatre at any time and see a show in the way that’s going to serve them best.” Building the plane in midair can be treacherous and terrifying – but there’s no feeling like the feeling when it flies.