Bold Theatre is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit theatre company based in Russellville, Arkansas. It did not start here, and it did not run without interruption. Both of those facts matter to what the company is doing now.
California, 2020–2023
Bold Theatre produced live theatre in California from 2020 to 2023. In 2023 it lost its building. A theatre company without a building can keep making work, but it cannot keep a season, a schedule, or an audience that knows where to find it. The company paused.
Coming home
Founder and artistic director John J. Pistone is a Pope County native. He first walked onstage at age five in Clarksville, Arkansas, trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, served roughly ten years with U.S. Navy Combat Camera in the Pacific Fleet including a deployment to Iraq, and spent more than twelve years in Los Angeles working full time as an actor, director and producer. Bold Theatre’s move to Arkansas is a return, not an expansion.
A room of our own
Bold Theatre is building Foundry Entertainment Hall in Russellville — a five-thousand-square-foot tin-metal warehouse with exposed red steel trusses, secured on a long-term lease. The plan is roughly seventy-five seats on a flexible floor: stage on one side, seating on the other, concessions and restrooms flanking the entry, backstage at the rear. Because the floor is reconfigurable, the room can be reset for a play, a concert, a reading, or a rental, rather than being locked into one shape forever.
The building is a work in progress and we will report on it here as it moves, including the parts that go slower than we would like.
Working while we build
The company is not waiting on the building to make work. Over the past year Bold Theatre has earned its way providing event and entertainment services, and this November it stages Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men at the Rialto Community Arts Center in Morrilton.
What we are for
Everyone is welcome, every voice gets heard, and anyone who wants to tell a story has a place to tell it. That is the whole of it.