Umbrella Project founding members Norah Elges, Gavin Reub, and Erin Bednarz sat down the City Arts Magazine Senior Editor Gemma Wilson to talk about how the company got started and what’s coming up next.
Making theatre is messy, complicated and expensive; making successful theatre is even more so. Umbrella Project, a playwright-centric organization formed last year by young theatre professionals Norah Elges, Erin Bednarz and Gavin Reub, hopes to make that process a little easier. Describing Umbrella Project is tricky because there isn’t much like it. They’re not a theatre company and they don’t want to produce plays—they want to help playwrights improve plays and then connect those plays with organizations to produce them. It sounds at first like an unnecessary middleman, but they might be on to something.
Umbrella Project 