A Letter from Artistic Director Heidi S Howard

Greetings loves,

As Summer nears its end, I reflect on the resilience, courage, and breath of all those who share 7 Stages as a home. I am filled with gratitude for our artists, students, patrons, renters, board and staff who remain committed to representing a multilayered global community through fierce and brave storytelling.

This past season, Youth Creates led us into a season full of celebration, shared methods, vital conversations, and courage to continue to find light in the shadows of these dark times. The long-term commitment of supporting new work, and new methods of producing resulted in the innovative world première of What Are You? which we have been creating for over 5 years with Nicolette Emanuelle. Stay tuned for our most recent new work we began with our dear friend Dorothy Victoria Bell during our Home Brew Series presentation of Incarceration Plantation: The Musical! Both Dorothy and Nicolette are fiercely weird in the most beautiful and courageous ways with their truths and artistry. Further, our colleagues and partners with First Voices Festival celebrations, Service Saturdays and Art of Activism programs have grounded our work in the community, beyond the stage, with grace.

These relationships, dreamings, gatherings and work remind me every day that we must always strive to be stewards of culture. We must keep collaborating, keep creating, keep taking risks and keep loving loud. By imagining new ways to bring light to the darkness, we continue to forge the way for the future.

Sending big love, may we all hold onto creative hope, breath and the courage to persevere. Onward we roll.

~ Heidi & the 7 Stages family

7 Stages Productions

Dream Theory – Where dreams and nightmares collide

July 2024

An original production by the Youth Creates 2024 Ensemble.

From the young minds of Youth Creates comes a world of gods, mortals, and monsters. As two sibling gods start to drift apart, their realms are placed on the verge of a devastating war. Will these realms break apart, or will this story have a happily ever after?

Youth Creates is 7 Stages’ training program providing experiential learning and performance opportunities for teenagers. Through playwriting, design, and performance, students collaborate to create an original production. We will explore various techniques and skills, support your visions and ultimately celebrate by welcoming audiences to our world premiere!

Third Annual First Voices Festival

November 2024

7 Stages joined forces with Turtle Island Trading, Zintkala Zi PowWow, the L5P Business Association and Plaza Theatre in producing the third annual First Voices Festival, A Celebration of Indigenous Cultures. Activities included the world premiere of What Are You? by Nicolette Emanuelle, an outdoor PowWow with Native American performers and vendors, an Art of Activism dialogue with Muscogee (Creek) elder William Harjo, and a special screening of the documentary Bad River at Plaza Theatre.

What Are You?

November 2024

An exploration of what it means to be multi-racial in America. Created by Nicolette Emanuelle, who has roots in the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, this original production delves into the complexities of racial identity through a blend of movement, music, and personal testimonies.

Creator Nicolette Emanuelle, with Meredith Gordon, Monica Martell, Jacque Pritz and Arthur McDaniel, confronts the relentless question “what are you?”, weaving together striking and moving commonalities found in interviews with other multi-racial individuals, highlighting their unique struggles and the beauty of their identities.

Incarceration Plantation – A Home Brew Series work in development

March 2025

A sister and brother’s creative journey, despite the walls that keep them apart. They reflect on more than 30 years of dealing with America’s prison system, its impact, and how systemic racism and the disproportionate sentencing of Black people perpetuates a form of modern slavery.

7 Stages’ Home Brew Series, a program that provides a platform and resources for works in development. While Home Brews offer support at any stage in the development process, this new production is in the seedling stage. This public sharing will offer audiences select new musical and movement compositions, letters between Dorothy and Roger, original poetry created behind bars and a sneak peak into the overall storyline.

Vital Conversations

Art of Activism at First Voices Festival

November 2024

An evening of conversation and a shared meal, kicking off a full weekend of festivities with special guest Muscogee (Creek) elder William Harjo and loaded Fry Bread dishes from Three Sisters Soulfood!

William is a storyteller and flute maker who has been a part of Powwows all over the country, including First Voices Festival for the last two years. This was a great opportunity to talk with someone with lots of knowledge about Powwows, traditional arts, and history.

Flip the Dirt

January 2025

With an open stage and an open mic, we welcomed the public to gather in dance, story, music, poetry, and performance; to sketch the future of our beloved community.

Artists Theresa Davis, Dana Lupton, Celeste Miller, Shannon Turner, and Charné Furcron guided artistic responses, and the event culminated in a dance party for healing, ritual, and release.

Art of Activism – Responses and Dialogue inspired by Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown

March 2025

7 Stages brought together community experts, artists and patrons for a powerful conversation inspired by the book Interior Chinatown. By diving into this work, we could address representation and the reduction of the identities of people of color to stereotypes. 

The conversation was supported by the sharing of artistic responses from guest artists Dorothy Bell and Theresa Davis.

Writing Between the Frames – Poetry and prose in screenplay form

April 2025

This writing workshop hosted by Theresa Davis at ArtsXchange was inspired by the book Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. The event was a celebration of National Poetry Month, promoting literacy and storytelling with the Big Read.

“If your life were a movie, what genre would it be? What stereotypical role do you feel you’ve played in your life?” 

In this workshop, participants played with structure, identity, and self-perception, mirroring the layered storytelling in Interior Chinatown. The screenplay format exposed the roles we unconsciously perform while allowing for both humor and deep reflection.

7 Stages Collaborations

Supporting local artists through collaborative events.

Yallmark

An improvised parody of made-for-tv holiday movies received a full run at 7 Stages with Topher Payne, Amber Nash, and Kevin Gillese. Every night they took audience suggestions and used them to weave together a holiday romance that was equal parts homage and satire.

Southern Fried Bake-Off – Essential Theatre

In its second year, the Southern Fried Bake-Off was an exhilarating 24 hour play festival where participants wrote, rehearsed, and performed brand new plays based on a Bake-Off theme and a list of “ingredients,” then performed in front of a live audience. Playwrights and performers submitted and were selected randomly in a lottery.

Atlanta Fringe Festival 

The Atlanta Fringe Festival is an annual multidisciplinary performing arts event of galactic proportions. With more than 375 showtimes in 11 venues featuring everything from comedy and drama to dance, circus, magic, puppetry, and more, plus free Kids Fringe shows, free Street Fringe busking performances, and free Fringe Audio shows streaming online, there is truly something for everyone at the Fringe!

Service Saturdays

7 Stages regularly hosts Service Saturdays with the aim to help our community thrive by providing vital resources while bringing together local community-driven organizations under one roof. These free events also feature art pop-ups, open mics, and other creative activities.

Among the organizations we work with are Little Free Contentious Library, Just a Touch Ministries, Fulton County Board of Health, and LifeSouth Community Blood Centers.

Renovations/Improvements

Thanks to a Capital Improvement Grant from Georgia Council for the Arts, 7 Stages was able to make significant repairs to several areas of our theater.

• Back entrance canopy and loading door
• Second story canopy
• Bathroom wall panels
• Box office entrance

Click here for PDF Version of 2024/2025 Year in Review

We’d like to take a moment to share some of the highlights of our recent 43rd season. Thank you for joining us when you were able.
You are the entire reason we do it.

7 Stages is no stranger to digging into the messy topics that often divide us. As this season honored the work of US Poet Laureate and Mvskoke (Muscogee Creek Nation) Artist Joy Harjo and her book, An American Sunrise, we engaged in vital conversations that, at times, were uncomfortable. For over 40 years our space has occupied the unceded land of the Creek and Muskogee people. This year’s work has taught us about that land and led us to direct action. We have implemented a $1 per ticket Land Use Fee for all tickets sold to our events. These funds are donated directly to Indigenous organizations doing the work. It is our responsibility to reflect on our history, to confront our own complacency in colonialism, and to learn ways we can all better care for our earth and each other.

Our 43rd season offered brave stories and platforms to connect and create necessary pathways towards healing. This is a critical time to leverage our unique moment in history to create post-pandemic culture that honors the past, acknowledges pain, fear, and inequity, and ultimately sets us all up for sunrises that brighten our future.

We are so grateful to our artists and staff. The work they were able to do in the face of such daunting obstacles was incredible. We thank our patrons and sponsors too, for without their support in all forms for over 4 decades, we wouldn’t be able to share this work.

Our mission of focusing on the social, political, and spiritual values of our culture is perhaps more relevant now than when Del and Faye began
over 40 years ago. Your support means the world to us and allows us to continue developing new playwrights with new methods of collaboration. Whether it is attending in person or on-line, participating in one of our many discussions around the work onstage, sharing an event on social media, or donating. We cherish all of it.

We have some exciting things in store for our upcoming 44th season. We hope you’ll join us however you are able. Please consider donating as we return to full capacity to help us continue this important work in our community, and most of all thank you!

The following prose and poetry were submitted by participants in the virtual workshop Love Letters to Your Younger Self, presented by 7 Stages Theatre in collaboration with GA Center for the Book and Decatur Library.

In conjunction with Valentine’s Day 2021, host Theresa Davis led the workshop with a prompt to peek back in time–to reach out to a younger version of yourself.

Here are their stories:

Look@U being U

Belinda Dapreis

Look at you being you

Look at you doing everything you have wanted to do.

Look at you being you

Look at you being new

Look at all the things you’re going to do

Look what you have accomplished without the slightest gripe

Fight baby Fight

Keep fighting the good fight

Make good trouble against all the odds

Stay strong when times are hard

Look at you being you

I’m so proud of you

Keep living everyday like its new

Dagmar Epsten

Liebe Dagmar,
Remember nineteen-sixty-two when Papa paced the living room,
saying there will be another war.
He had lived through two wars in Germany
and he said there will be another war,
pacing the living room in Germany in front of the
new black and white tee-vee,
talking about Cu-bah,
Soviet Union, Oo-Es-Ah.
You, not knowing what he was talking about,
but I am sure you remember it
like I do,
like yesterday.
Your mother, in the meantime,
planning to send you to school
as early as possible, at five,
worried that you would not
pass the test for underage enrollment,
her ticket to more freedom.
You, soon looking dapper
in your bright-red new school outfit,
clashing with the pink first-day-of-school
chocolate-and-candy-filled cone,
the German equivalent of a piñata,
not realizing that
subsequent days
would be more serious.
But, let me fill you in,
now, in twenty-twenty-one, any first day of school
is rare excitement,
relief from home confinement.
Deine Dagmar

Dagmar Epsten 02-23-2021

Gelia Dolcimascolo

THE CUT: 1961

I was thirteen, living in Queens, New York. I’d been growing my fine, super-straight light-brown hair since elementary school, so I could braid it and roll it up into the required bun for ballet girls. I was going to try out for Performing Arts High School in Manhattan. 

I got into P.A. – and danced my heart out for the next four years. Sadly, I was not happy there: you had to be on top of the totem pole to be noticed in the Dance Department. Still, my hair, the longest in our grade, was my identity; my girlfriends loved it. Of course, in dance classes, it had to be UP, so I became a certified bunhead.

 Leap forward to senior year. A modern dance major by then (the Department switched me after freshman year), I auditioned barefoot for Julliard, allowing my tresses to fall unbound to the stage floor as I arched back to the sounds of “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” by Claude Debussy. 

I made it! 

But – I didn’t get a scholarship. No money, no Juilliard. 

Shortly after that audition, a week before graduation day, I made an appointment at a “beauty shop” close to home.  “Can you give me a ‘flip’?” I asked the hairdresser. Within an hour, my identity landed in her trashcan. 

On graduation day, my friends wept, but I grinned. 

The hard truth, though, was my straight hair didn’t “flip.” Thus began both my liberation from four years of intense dance competition to sleeping on foam rollers. My day life became studio-hopping, sales jobs, and more auditions.

A dance buddy suggested we take classes at a new studio at the “Y” on Eighth Avenue in the Fifties at Clark Center for the Performing Arts. A guy named Alvin Ailey and his company taught there. 

“Let’s try Jimmie Truitte’s class,” she said. We did. I got myself a work-study spot and took modern classes four times a week with Jimmie, who made me fall in love with dance all over again. Along with a new life, came a new friend, Sonja. An “older” gal (twenty!), Sonja had the shortest, darkest hair of any girl I’d known. She led me to her Broadway hairdresser, and I did it. No more rollers. No more braids: A pixie cut. 

For the first time, construction workers were whistling at me. They never bothered me. At least I was noticed.

Gelia Dolcimascolo

THE GIRL WITH THE FLAXEN HAIR*

auditioned for Juilliard

back in the Sixties.

Her locks swayed below her knees

as she spiraled and spun;

she wished they’d covered

her insignificant face,

hid her imperfect body,

whose heels 

did not quite connect

with her coccyx

when they asked her to crouch

profile on the stage.

 

Though the strains 

of Debussy 

allowed her entry, 

she’d hoped

for a scholarship

she never received,

 

and budgets dictated

a different stage.

 

* Title of a composition by Claude Debussy