On the Banks of the Chattahoochee

ON A RECENT WEEKNIGHT IN DOWNTOWN Columbus, Ga., I was up late laughing with friends over pints of craft beer. This was a unique situation for me, as a mom with two young kids and a full-time-plus job. I was attending a one-off improv class hosted by Muddy Water Theatre Project, a brand-new pop-up theatre company founded by local artists Austin Sargent and Ben Redding. Truth be told, I needed more than one pint to get through some of the games; my heart pounded like it did during the improv classes I took at the local Springer Theatre Academy as a kid. But as I looked around at the 15 or so other adults—men and women ranging in age from 20s to early 50s—I was thrilled by what I saw.

Here in this mid-sized city in the Deep South, a place I swore I would leave after high school and never return, I was living a version of life I never thought possible. An event like this would have been nonexistent in the early 2000s, when I graduated high school. The craft beer wasn’t there, and neither were city blocks of trendy restaurants and bars in the downtown area. The only active theatre in town then was the Springer Opera House, a historic venue founded in 1871 with an annual budget of $2.5 million and audience of 112,500. There were no plucky new theatre projects run by some pseudo-prodigal children, determined to infuse more inclusive, diverse, and innovative theatre programming into the city’s cultural fabric.

But now there are.