Our awesome project is the establishment of Nightbloom Theatre Company with the world premiere of I’M ALIVE YOU BASTARDS AND I ALWAYS WILL BE, by Roxie Perkins, who wrote the libretto for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera p r i s m. As two young directors who have been working in the professional theatre field and seen the barriers to entry facing young artists, we founded Nightbloom Theatre Company to provide significant opportunity to young artists for professional development. In doing so, we are committed to the abolition of the unpaid internship by paying all artists who work on Nightbloom productions a fair wage.

Nightbloom Theatre Co., helmed by co-artistic directors Casey Venema and Colin Anderson, is a theatrical collective with the mission to produce plays, both new and canonical, that bolster the voices of marginalized persons in our contemporary world, and to strengthen the Cleveland theatre community by providing significant artistic opportunity to emerging artists beyond what can be achieved in an internship or assistantship. We believe strongly in the importance of work created in response to oppression and political turmoil and are committed to producing work that centers and is written, performed, directed and designed by women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized voices. These pieces are historically overlooked and deemed "too risky" for professional production. In an effort to encourage new and diverse work in Cleveland, we prioritize taking risks in all of our productions, both scripted and devised.

With a wicked sense of humor and horror, I’M ALIVE... implodes conventional theatrical form in a wrathful celebration of the ugliness of preteen girlhood. We will be staging the piece from October 2nd to October 6th, and it will be produced in partnership with Maelstrom Collaborative Arts. Their generous in-kind sponsorship, providing the space at an extremely low rate, has ensured the feasibility of I'M ALIVE...