CAST Announces Return to Theatre Scene After 10-Year Absence

Carolina Actor’s Studio Theatre (CAST), a local theatre company that once electrified Charlotte audiences with thought-provoking and experiential multimedia productions, will return to the city’s theatre scene next month after a 10-year absence. 

Produced by CAST co-founders Michael Simmons and Dee Abdullah in association with Actors Collaborative Theatre (ACT), the Pulitzer-nominated play Alabaster will run Feb. 27-March 16  in the Van Every Theatre at the Mint Museum’s Randolph Road location. 

Simmons believes the upcoming production signposts a resurrection of much more than CAST and its return to theatre after a decade.

“It’s a resurrection of the arts,” Simmons says. “It’s a resurrection of our passion, and it’s a resurrection of the philosophy of CAST.”

Set in the titular tornado-ravaged Alabama town, Alabaster is a darkly comic drama with a cast comprising four women. 

June, played by Zoe Matney, has been scarred both physically and emotionally by the natural disaster that has leveled her town. She is comforted by her beloved (and talking) goats, Bib and Weezy, portrayed by Debbie Swanson and Kelly Mizell. 

When prominent photographer Alice, played by Cynthia Farbman Harris, visits to take pictures of June’s visible scars, both women are forced to reconcile the pain of loss and recovery. 

When initially approached in spring 2024 by ACT co-founders Michael and Cynthia Farbman Harris to stage the play, CAST’s artistic director Michael Simmons wasn’t sure he could pull off the production.

“I told Cynthia it might be above my pay grade,” Simmons says. “I wondered how I could create a tornado inside the theater — and I don’t speak goat.”

The fact that Simmons accepted those challenges should be no surprise to theatergoers familiar with CAST’s complex and illustrious past. Founded as an acting school by Abdullah and Ed Gilweit  in 1992, CAST partnered with Simmons’ production company Victory Pictures and fledgling theatre troupe Another Roadside Performance Company, which was run by Simmons’ son Robert Lee Simmons. 

In 2000, Gilweit and Simmons rebranded CAST as a theatre company all its own. After Gilweit’s death in 2002, Simmons became the managing artistic director.   

“Ed’s last words to me were ‘Don’t let CAST die,’” Simmons says.

In 2006, the company became a nonprofit. Initially operating out of a building with a leaky roof on Clement Avenue in Plaza Midwood, CAST became known for productions boasting large-scale installations and elaborate sets that immersed audiences completely into the reality of each production. 

A CAST run of Peter Weiss’ 1963 play Marat/Sade placed the audience alongside performers in an 18th-century insane asylum. Then for a 2009 staging of Metamorphoses, CAST built a heated 3,000-gallon water tank so mythological Roman gods and heroes could make underwater entrances and exits.

In 2011, with  the help of $30,000 in grants from the Arts and Science Council and Knight Foundation, the theatre troupe moved to larger quarters on North Davidson Street in NoDa @ 28th Street, a shopping center that now sits all but abandoned but was once home to the original Amelie’s location and a slew of other businesses and ventures.  

The new venue opened with an ambitious and successful staging of Tracy Letts’ 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama August: Osage County.

Throughout the company’s initial run of 16 years, CAST garnered multiple awards, including Theatre Company of the Year from Metrolina Theatre Association in 2009 and 2012. That organization also voted Simmons Theatre Person of the Year in 2009. 

Creative Loafing Charlotte awarded Simmons the same title in 2005 and honored CAST as Company of the Year in 2007 and 2009.

Despite CAST’s accolades and innovations, the company’s board of directors announced in June 2014 that the company was closing, citing financial pressures and dwindling attendance. After 64 productions over eight years in operation as a nonprofit, CAST shut its doors with a final performance of Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries. 

“It’s not a matter of we’re drowning under debt,” CAST board member Lisa Walker told WFAE at the time. “It’s a matter of we don’t have enough income year over year to manage to sustain. We’ve eaten away at any sort of resources that we have in that regard.”

Simmons disputes that narrative to this day, saying that the board simply had ceased to do fundraising, which was its primary job.

“I was really pissed at the board just because they were so negligent,” Simmons says. “There were answers; there were solutions [to CAST’s financial strains]. They just were too lazy to find them.” 

Devastated by CAST’s ignoble end, Simmons returned to being an airline pilot, a position he had held as a captain for Piedmont Airlines and then USAir before founding CAST. After his second stint flying, this time for USAirways/American Airlines, he retired to a farm in Lancaster County, South Carolina, where he and his wife Victoria provide a rescue home for horses, donkeys, goats and abandoned cats.

“It’s kind of become an unofficial animal sanctuary,” Simmons says. But the opportunity to create challenging theatre and revive CAST eventually came beckoning and Simmons answered the call.

“Ten years”, Simmons says in a press release from CAST, “is perhaps enough time for wounds to heal and scars to become art. Alabaster takes audiences on a similar journey, transforming challenges into a narrative of resilience and resurrection.”

In fact, Simmons says the play’s message can be boiled down to that one word: resurrection.

“We all have parts of our life where we just think it’s over,” he tells Queen City Nerve. 

Read more: Performers Discuss Tragic Demise of Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte (2022)

He recounts his own life experiences in which everything seemed to end with no way forward. He mentions passing up a career in Hollywood for the sake of his family, only to have his marriage dissolve a few years later. 

Simmons then took his first flying job, piloting an antique de Havilland Firefly, a 1936 airplane without navigation instruments, across the Atlantic, only to be fired after safely landing the aircraft in England. He stuck with flying until the opportunity to produce theatre came into his life. 

Then he put everything he had into CAST only to watch that come to an end.

With skill, hard word and hope from Simmons and his partners, cast and crew, Alabaster could also mark the resurrection of a spirit of adventure and experimentation in CLT’s theatre scene.