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History | Recent Awards

MISSION

Forum Theatre produces adventurous, relevant, and challenging plays that inspire discussion and build community around productions that are accessible, affordable, and entertaining.

Since Forum Theatre’s inception, we have aimed to be both the home for stories that provoke discussion and the place to host that discussion. We want our plays to be a conversation with the audience. We tell stories about who we are as a local, national, and global community.

So what is a Forum show? That’s never been the easiest thing to describe, but a few things tend to always be true: A Forum show asks big questions. A Forum show is intricate and challenging, but has a big heart at its center. And a Forum show gives you something to think about and a lot to talk about.

HISTORY

Founded in 2003 as a nomadic, multi-media performance company, Forum Theatre (then known as Forum Theatre & Dance) chose the Nation's Capital as our our home base because of the exploding theatre scene and for the diversity of its truly global community. The name was chosen to harken thoughts of the Roman Forum where artists, politicians, philosophers, and citizens of all walks of life could gather and exchange ideas. Within a short time, the ensemble developed a focus on plays that tackle social, cultural, and political questions. Much like the Roman Theatre of its time, we wanted to be a place where everyone could gather and, through storytelling, explore the ways that we can all live better with one another-- as a local, national, and global community.

“a small local company with its foot on the gas.” 

Forum Theatre truly made its mark during the 2007-2008 season with the area premiere of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. The production earned Forum our first Helen Hayes Award nomination for Best Ensemble — an ensemble that the Washington Post dubbed “nearly flawless“ — and the final weeks sold out so quickly that Forum offered a remount the following winter. Forum continued to grow, artistically and institutionally, in 2008-2009. In response to the final production of the year, dark play or stories for boys, Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks dubbed Forum Theatre “a small local company with its foot on the gas.”

Just before our sixth season, Round House Theatre invited Forum to become the first resident theatre in their 135-seat Silver Spring venue — which is nearly twice the size of our former space on H Street NE. In creating our inaugural production in our new Silver Spring home, Forum chose a project that would engage a substantial team of artists over a long period and incite discussion within our new community. The resulting seven-hour repertory of both parts of Angels in America involved over forty local artists and technicians and drew 3,500 audience members to Silver Spring. Angels was later nominated for eight Helen Hayes Awards, ultimately winning the awards for Leading Actor and Lighting Design.

To open our seventh season, Forum produced only the third US production of Wajdi Mouawad’s epic Scorched, which led the Washington Post to dub Forum “a champion of the marathon.” This winter, Forum mounted Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare in conjunction with a month-long Wallace Festival, which launched a new initiative: “Forum ReActs,” in which musicians, dancers, and writers respond to shows in their own medium. Our season continued with a limited engagement of solo performer Zehra Fazal’s serio-comedic Headscarf and the Angry Bitch and Forum’s largest ensemble show in years, bobrauschenbergamerica by Charles L. Mee.

RECENT AWARDS