Grayson Kennedy on Gwydion Theatre Company: Inviting Controversy and Participation

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"We invite controversy because controversy breeds thought. We invite high emotions. We want it to be participatory with our audiences."

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There’s a newer storefront theater in town, and it’s starting to make a name for itself with its strong character-driven productions, controversial risks in programming, and artistic commitment to making a socio-political statement that will shape the discourse and resonate with a new generation of audience members. Gwydion Theatre Company, which started in LA, is currently in its fourth season here in Chicago, with the season opener Por’Knockers playing at the Greenhouse Theater Center now through October 4th.

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I sat down with Grayson Kennedy to discuss his founding of Gwydion Theatre Company, the philosophy and mission that drives their programming, and his journey as an actor and artistic director.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Thanks for doing this interview, Grayson! Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

I got kind of an unusual background. Most people in Chicago storefront right now do the whole high school to a BFA here. They go to Northwestern, Roosevelt, Columbia, etc. and settle here with their college classmates. I did the exact opposite. I’m from Detroit. When I was 17, I very randomly got cast in a TV show off a Craigslist ad and it brought me to Los Angeles. I was there for six episodes and it ended and didn't get picked up. I stayed there and just did a bunch of acting classes and studied with Louis Gossett Jr . from Roots and his wife, Michelle Gossett. Then I studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which is a conglomerate of studio schools with certain teachers. Through that, I met a group of 10 actors, and we started a theater company. We did stuff at the Hollywood Fringe Festival and did plays right in the middle of the pandemic. We caught some traction in LA, and I, frankly, just woke up one day and realized LA's not for me.

I read the Steppenwolf book by John Mayer , and then I read Ensemble , the theater Bible of Chicago. And I was like, ‘I think the place I want to be in is Chicago.’ It's closer to Detroit. I miss the Midwest, and I came here. Tommy Thams, my childhood best friend, was in college at Wright State University in Dayton, and I knew I couldn’t do this company on my own. Half of the actors stayed behind in LA, half of them came here, but none of them were interested in administrative work. I needed someone to build the structure with me, so I recruited Tommy. He's the Executive Director now, and we fully incorporated in 2023. The rest is history.

How did you pick the name Gwydion Theatre?

Our original name that I wanted was the Greasy Shirt Theater Company, which, in retrospect, is terrible. It's from an Al Pacino quote where he says, ‘An actor needs to wear a greasy shirt.’ I liked it, but the name doesn't roll off the tongue.

I'm very into old mythology and history and religion. I read a book of British mythology, and Gwydion is their Loki figure. He's a trickster god, and one of his purviews was theater. In Welsh mythology, he put on this play that convinced the Queen of Wales. The son that gets the coat of arms is your heir, that's the head of the next generation. She had two sons — one of them was fated to be the hero, and the other was fated to be the villain. She gave the coat to the villain, so Gwydion put on this trickster play and convinced her to switch it to the hero, who became this big hero in Welsh mythology. We wanted our theater to actually have tangible change like that one did. It also rolled off the tongue. When we pitched it to people, they'd look at it and didn't know how to pronounce it, so we had to tell them. The more we told them, they would repeat it back and it stuck in their brain. They didn't forget us. So it solidified itself.

Gwydion’s mission is “Theatre for a new age” and serving as a platform for your ensemble’s generation. On your website, you mention building off of Grotowski’s theory of “Poor Theater.” Can you explain what that is and why that’s your approach in recentering theatre in our generation's socio-political discourse?

Not to be too critical of theaters these days, but I do think we're in a dark age of Chicago theater, and some of that has to do with theater education. I'm very passionate about advocating and changing theater education because it was advertised to me before I got here that this is a blue collar actor town. Everybody's building sets, you roll up your sleeves, you eat your dinner, you say your lines, you really go at it. I learned very quickly that that was not the case anymore. It became this emulation of Broadway, and theater became, ‘How can I use my money to make it seem like I'm Court Theatre or Steppenwolf?’, which felt so contradictory to the traditions that brought me here.

In his book Towards a Poor Theatre , Grotowski ran this experiment at this tiny country theater in Poland. They're famous for an experiment where they made their actors run 15 miles, and then they would beat them with sticks — this was the '50s — and then they would do their plays. The experiment that really got me is when they did Tango by Sławomir Mrożek. They first did it full set, fully funded, light, sound, famous actors, and they ran it for a week. The next week, they did it all, but they took away the lights, and then they did it all again, and took away the set. They did it all again until it was literally 10 actors naked on stage, no props, nothing. They found that as you're developing and moving forward, it's not that you reduce the quality by reducing the amount of things that are in it — it’s that it makes you have to think in a different way and change the play itself to fit the form.

Studio 44 at Greenhouse Theater — which is where Por’Knockers is — is a perfect example of Chicago theater that makes you think inside the box. You have to go into these small theaters, and it's no longer, ‘How can I emulate Broadway?’ It’s, ‘How can I make this play fit this space? How could I make these actors who work day jobs fit their life around this?’ Thinking inside the box makes it much more creative. I've seen some storefront shows where they just cram everything in a tiny box, and the lights get in the way of the story or something gets in the way of the connection of the audience.

Now, instead of coming at a play from the angle of, ‘What do I need to make this great?’ It's, ‘What do I not need to make this great? What's something we can survive without?’ and then we'll play around with it in rehearsals. In Por’Knockers, one thing we felt we needed was the gold teeth. That moment didn't hit well without the gold teeth. But there are certain things that we didn't need. It was very instrumental in the scripts that you needed a rotary phone and these long pauses with it. But we found that if we take the rotary phone away, it informs these pauses with something else, and it allowed us to connect as characters so much better and to have subtle motivations in these silences. That is what Chicago theater is to me.

And that’s the perfect segue, because I really want to talk to you about Por’Knockers, your latest production running through October 4th at the Greenhouse Theater Center . How did you discover this piece, why did you pick this show over Lynn Nottage ’s Pulitzer-winning plays, and why did you ultimately decide on staging it now?

The obvious concern our first three seasons was not only that our productions did not reflect the city we were in — the more important part is that the audiences didn't reflect the city we were in. It was a predominantly white audience. Because we were in Lincoln Park, our next biggest demographic was Southeast Asian audience members. We started talking with them after and asked, ‘What made you come see this?’ And we determined it was more or less random. As we kept polling audience members on what would make them come back, it always came down to programming.

I had the opportunity to work with Ron OJ Parson for An Enemy of the People, and he is a champion of Black theater here in Chicago. Henrik Ibsen and An Enemy of the People is very clearly not Black theater, and Ron didn't direct it like that, but he knew that there's a story for people of color who live in the city within this play. and he achieved that through his casting. I remember the show was going up, and Ron sat in the green room during previews and said, ‘I have a really big problem right now. The audiences are all white. We need to get a diverse audience 'cause this play is not just for white people.’ As I’m listening to him talk about programming and casting, I felt like I was doing the casting part right at Gwydion, I was doing the advocacy part right, but my programming was lacking.

Five years ago in LA, I had a job at the Odyssey Theatre. They closed down during the pandemic, and they paid me by the hour to clean out their offices. There was this big cardboard box full of manuscripts and old vinyl records, and they said, ‘You can take those if you want. We don't want them.’ I swear it was like a heavenly beam of light on this Por’Knockers script by Lynn Nottage , and I was like, ‘I know Lynn Nottage , I'm gonna read this.’ And I read it, and while I recognize it's not a perfect play, it's an early work — take an early work of Shakespeare, you're gonna find some crap in it, but Coriolanus is reproduced because there's these nuggets of gold in it — but I just felt her voice was so clearly defined in her dialogue that the story didn't matter to me. I almost couldn't tell you what it was even about, but I was telling all my friends about the monologue, particularly James's monologue about sugar in Black communities. It just stuck in my brain like a song for years. I would call and email her agents about twice a month for four years. Just randomly over the summer, I called and they picked up. I said, ‘Hey, this is crazy. There’s this play that happened 30 years ago. It ran for two performances and closed. I want to do it.’ And they said, ‘Okay.’ A couple weeks later, we got the rights for it for a very generous deal. We got a grant through The Saints to put it on and make sure we hired a cast that I felt we needed since it’s such a performance driven piece. We needed great actors. I wanted to cast myself in it because it was just such a passion of mine, and we did it.

Avery Willis Hoffman, the new Artistic Director at Court, who I think is just such an amazing artist, took a photo of it and sent it to Lynn, who actually reached out to us on social media and invited us to be a part of her nationwide theater festival for our closing weekend . It solidified that this was perfect.

We’ve gotten some harsh reviews. I got an email from somebody that said, ‘Not only will I never see another Gwydion show again, I will never see another theater show again, because this was so tasteless and so offensive.’ And it made us all so excited. Then we’re talking to the audience members after, and it's so many people I've never seen before, so many artists of color who have never been exposed to Gwydion coming in and being interested in the work we're doing.

It’s meant so much to see the controversial divide. Younger people definitely resonate with it more. I was born, and then 9/11 happened, and then the Boston bombing happened, and Iraq. The violence in our generation is just so pertinent, and that's part of our generation's voice. People don't

_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/chicago/article/Interview-Grayson-Kennedy-at-Gwydion-Theatre-Company-20260925)._