Venue: Perseverance Theatre
Town: Juneau, US

Perseverance Theatre is a professional theater company located on Douglas Island in Juneau, Alaska. It is Alaska's only professional theater and is particularly dedicated to developing and working with Alaskan artists and to producing plays celebrating Alaskan culture, history, and themes. Perseverance Theatre was founded in 1979 by Molly Smith. She developed it as an important not-for-profit regional theater that collaborated with leading theater artists. It has premiered more than 50 new plays by Alaskan and national playwrights. Paula Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned To Drive was written and developed while Vogel was an artist-in-residence with the company. Smith served as artistic director from the theater's founding until 1998, when she left to become artistic director of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. She was succeeded by Peter DuBois, who served until the fall of 2003. He was appointed Associate Producer, then the Resident Director, at the Public Theater in New York City. In July 2008, DuBois became Artistic Director of Boston's Huntington Theatre. In 2004, PJ Paparelli became Artistic Director of Perseverance Theatre. He left in November 2007, to lead the American Theatre Company in Chicago. Art Rotch served as Executive Artistic Director from 2008-2019. Rotch is a Perseverance alumnus who earned an M.F.A. in set design at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. In 2018 Art Rotch was joined by Managing Director Joshua Midget. Perseverance produces a full season of plays from September to May on its 138-seat Mainstage. Readings, as well as productions generated by the theatre's educational programs, are also regularly produced in the Phoenix, the theatre smaller rehearsal space. In 2012 Perseverance Theatre began performing its full season in Anchorage. For the summer of 2014 Perseverance created a summer series in downtown Juneau called Summerfest. In 2001, Perseverance Theatre signed an agreement with the University of Alaska Southeast to