This past year, Wellesley Repertory Theatre (WRT), the College’s award-winning professional theatre company, announced its new grant program, which will provide funding every two years to three alums working on original or adapted performing arts projects. Maia Macdonald ’06, Annie Jin Wang ’14, and Sabina Sethi Unni ’19 are the inaugural grant recipients.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, WRT had to pause its on-campus productions and contend with the reality that it could no longer continue to carry out its mission of “putting together a diverse group of people that interacts, moves in sync, sometimes in competition, but always working toward a common goal” in the same way. After many conversations with alums working in theatre about the best way to support theatre professionals, the company decided to start a grant program, using funds from the endowment given to WRT by Ruth Nagel Jones ’42. This year’s grantees each received up to $7,500.
Inspired by its mission, the company, which was founded by Nora Hussey, artistic director emerita of Wellesley College Theatre and Wellesley Repertory Theatre, plans to “use our resources in this new form to create opportunities that have direct and lasting impact on the manifold creative lives and careers of our graduates in an evolving, multifaceted artistic landscape, from our shared starting point of Wellesley College,” says Marta Rainer ’98, director of theatre and theatre studies and artistic director of WRT.
Rainer, Hussey, and Lois Roach, senior lecturer in theatre studies, evaluated the submissions for the 2024–25 grants. A key objective of the grant program is to support a wide range of projects, Rainer says: “This year’s projects are in conversation with each other, even though they’re all so different, and excitingly, they’re nothing like what Wellesley Repertory Theatre has staged in the past. They’re an expansion.”
Macdonald, an interdisciplinary artist and producer, spent the past year writing, sculpting, doing movement and lighting studies, and completing the final mixes of music to prepare for an immersive stage show around her upcoming album of original music. Recently, she began filming experimental movement work and improvisational lighting on different stages and spaces in Brooklyn.
“The WRT grant has offered such robust moral, spiritual, and monetary support to explore ideas in embodied performance, research, and sound design,” Macdonald says. “It has facilitated collaborations and approaches to making a stage show that previously lived only in a dream space.”
As a public artist with a background in community organizing and urban planning, Unni is interested in using public theatre to teach New York City communities directly affected by climate change about disaster preparedness. Unni and her team of over 20 performers, designers, and community organizers partner with New York City Emergency Management and other local climate-focused groups to provide audiences with free emergency disaster resources (and oat milk chai).
Unni wrote and directed Flood Sensor Aunty, a comedy about an anthropomorphized flood sensor who works in her aunt’s chai shop but dreams of becoming a movie star, to teach audiences how to protect themselves from floods and foster mutual aid in their communities.
After the first round of performances in September 2024, Unni connected with many organizations that wanted to support culturally informed climate programming but didn’t have the funding. Thanks to the WRT grant, the team will perform Flood Sensor Aunty for free at six community spaces in New York to celebrate Earth Day in April. Unni says the grant also allowed her to stage additional free performances in New York, pay actors and collaborators equitably, rehearse changes to the performance based on feedback from climate experts and community organizers, and purchase microphones to improve the sound quality in larger public spaces.
Wang, a dramaturg and writer, collaborated with artist Cinthia Chen on Anna May Wong: The Actress Who Died a Thousand Deaths, an experimental theatre piece that follows Wong in her late 30s, after she is passed over for the role of O-Lan in the film The Good Earth. (The role ultimately went to Luise Rainer, a white European actress, who performed in yellowface and received an Academy Award, and who is not related to Wellesley’s Rainer.) Throughout the piece, Wong has surreal interactions with her father, co-stars, and lovers on the sets of some of her most iconic films, leading her to take control of the camera and redirect the gaze that fetishized her identity onscreen.
Wang and Chen’s grant-funded project includes writing a new script for the piece and creating a workshop presentation.
“While dedicated time to write a whole new draft of the script is always valuable, what this grant opens up for us is resources and space to deconstruct the dramaturgy of the apparatus/camera to experiment with staging, pay other collaborators, and build a new tech kit that can meet the demands of our vision,” Wang says. “We also love that receiving this grant has opened conversations with Tufts University [Chen’s alma mater] for workshop development. It feels so right for us to be making this piece with the support of our alma maters.”
The grant recipients will present their work at the inaugural Wellesley Repertory Theatre Festival, scheduled for September 2025. Rainer envisions the event as an ongoing opportunity for the Wellesley community to connect with the artists and each other, expand their definition of theatre, and feel inspired by the projects.
“We’re still fine-tuning the details, but we imagine there might be performances, classroom visits, workshops, and panel discussions throughout the week,” she says. “It’s the sesquicentennial of the College, so we would love to explore ways for the festival to also be a celebration of our alum body. We hope to allow for different points of contact between the work the artists are doing and the academic work of other departments on campus.”
Wang hopes festival attendees will leave with a better understanding of the creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration that goes into developing a new theatre production. “Given how our artistic and cultural institutions are being systematically censored and destabilized, we need more curious, smart, and passionate people to share in our advocacy of the arts,” she says. “I think education about how art is made is key to that.”
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