The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
$100K grant affirms theater group’s work
Theater group staging grotesque musical ‘Thank-skilling.’
Dad’s Garage finds validation in a grant from the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta,
Dad’s Garage Theatre, which has aligned its mission with subversive comedy and bacon, received validation this week when it announced a $100,000 grant from the Com- munity Foundation for Greater Atlanta.
The grant will be delivered over a two-year period and will help to cover the theater’s million-dollar yearly operating costs. “It’s an incredible level of support for our organization,” said the theater’s development director, Stephen Barwick.
The theater won a $75,000 “Managing for Excellence” award earlier this year, also from the Community Foun- dation, a group, Barwick said, that has been “a tremendous supporter of Dad’s Garage Theatre.” Since 1951,
the foundation has supported nonprofits and faith-based organizations through grants and educational opportunities.
It has been a tumultuous period of change for the nonprofit theater group. Homeless since it moved out of its Inman Park theater in 2013, the improvisational troupe has been putting on performances at 7 Stages in Little Five Points and at other locales, though not at its usual blistering pace of 300 shows a year.
“We haven’t kept to a consistent schedule because we’re renting space,” Barwick said. The theater group has also bought and renovated a new home in the Old Fourth Ward, courtesy of a successful $1 million fundraising campaign.
That new space will open at the end of the year, Barwick said. In the meantime, the company is putting on a holiday show called “Thankskill- ing the Musical” at the 7 Stages facility, and at the end of the month, it will open “Merry %#!*-ing Christmas” at the Alliance Theatre.
The Thanksgiving-themed show, they write, is “the most brazenly offensive show we’ve foolishly decided to take on. This show has singing, dancing, blood, and a very homicidal turkey.”
A big fundraiser for the company is its special spring BaconFest, described as “an unbridled bash filled to the brim with the 3 B’s: BEER. BANDS. BACON.” In 2012, Kevin Bacon, who happened to be in town filming a Fox television pilot, dropped in and had a jolly time. Since then, he has developed a rapport with Dad’s.