Steel River Playhouse gets NEA grant
Money will fund “Healing on High Street” initiative
Steel River Playhouse is one of only 262 arts organizations in America to receive a $10,000 Challenge America grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This grant is part of $2.62 million in grants that were announced by the NEA as part of its first round of fiscal year 2023 grants.
According to information provided by the playhouse, the grant will support the “Healing on High Street” initiative.
The Healing on High Street initiative was initially made possible by a grant from the Pottstown Area Health and Wellness Foundation and culminated in a new play entitled “A Promise to Pottstown.”
The play tells the story of Pottstown, drawing on its wealth of diversity and amplifying voices that often remain unheard. In collaboration with community partners, the project brought together a team with an interest in transformational storytelling,
social justice and diversity.
To create the original work, Brie Knight, an awardwinning playwright, joined the team.
The Pottstown Trauma Informed Community Connection, or PTICC, and the YWCA Tri-County Area conducted approximately 100 interviews across diverse populations in Pottstown, ranging from school students to senior citizens. Then a community cohort gave feedback to help focus the responses, working with Knight to create the play, which went through several iterations to get to its final status.
A portion of the work was performed at the YWCA Week Without Violence in October, and a reading of the play was held for stakeholders at Steel River Playhouse in November. The NEA grant will help bring this work to the wider community with performances later this year.
“The National Endowment
for the Arts is proud to support arts projects in communities nationwide,” NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD, said in a press release. “Projects such as this one with Steel River Playhouse strengthen arts and cultural ecosystems, provide equitable opportunities for arts participation and practice, and contribute to the health of our communities and our economy.”
According to Artistic Director Leena Devlin, “I am so very proud of the team at Steel River Playhouse and our community partners that were instrumental in making this project happen. This grant will allow us to produce a play that we had commissioned to be written by the award-winning playwright Brie Knight. This play is a beautiful piece about the Pottstown community during the difficult times of the pandemic immediately following the murder of George Floyd. It is an incredible honor to be awarded this grant from the NEA and I’m looking forward to our community coming together to produce and enjoy this play.”
For more information on this and upcoming classes, camps, performances and other events at Steel River Playhouse, visit steelriver. org.