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Fran Powers and Powerstories Theatre celebrate a milestone
Fran Powers was at a crossroads in 1998. She’d left her position as executive director of the Tampa nonprofit Alpha House, and, as a head-cleanser, had signed up to ride a bicycle 3,500 miles from Seattle to Washington, D.C. for charity.
For a then-44-year-old woman, the American Lung Association/GTE “Big Ride” was a true test of mettle and determination. Although she’d spent months training for the trek, “it was grueling,” Powers remembered. And humbling. “Most of the riders were 25-year-old men.”
The epiphany arrived just as Powers, crossing the border into Wyoming and loudly singing “The Little Drummer Boy,” pumped the brakes and looked around. She considered the purple mountains’ majesty, above the fruited plain, and knew – she just knew – that after years of working in the corporate and then nonprofit worlds, she was going to return to her first love, theater.
At St. Louis native, Powers had an MFA in Theatre and Education (back home, she’d taught high school theater before moving to Florida to work as a training manager for Maas Brothers Department Stores).
At Alpha House, a home and counseling center for pregnant young women in crisis, she’d learned about the cathartic power of storytelling.
“I started helping them tell their stories,” Powers said, “and I saw the changes that it made in them. And I thought, there’s a way for me to do theater in Tampa the way I want to do it – with more of a social service kind of feel to it.”
In 2010: Fran Powers accepts the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from First Lady Michelle Obama.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Powerstories, the theater company Powers formed in in the wake of her Wyoming wake-up. The mission, as stated on the website, is “is staging true stories of women and girls to open minds and hearts and inspire action worldwide.”
Powerstories plays are by women, for women and (for the most part) performed by women.
“My a-ha moment on the bike ride was: I really wanted to help women tell their stories. A lot of my friends were women around the same age, and they kept saying ‘There’s nothing special about my life any more. I’m married, I have kids, what’s the big deal?’ And it just drove me crazy. It’s just not the way I roll. I think our lives are all so special.”
For the first dozen years, “power story” evenings consisted of women, sitting on a stool on a stage, telling their “truth” as only they could. It was new, raw and riveting – but because these were regular day-to-day tales from regular day-to-day women, each performance was a “one and done.”
“What I found was, once the women got up and did that the one time, they didn’t want to do it again. I wanted to do these shows over several weekends. Or we would then travel to Miami, take the show down there, or we would go to Sarasota.
“But the women weren’t actors. This wasn’t their life work. They just didn’t want to do it more than once, so I found I was putting out an unstable product.”
That’s when Powers began soliciting original plays with women’s themes, and employing bay area actors to perform them. Eventually, they started doing previously-produced plays, from playwrights all over the country.
Although the company had a small black box theater for a few years, until the landlord sold the building, Powerstories is currently a nomadic production company.
Opening July 11, Liz Duffy Adams’ Witch Hunt or, a Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World is being performed at Stageworks Theatre, 1150 E. Kennedy Blvd., through July 20.
Acclaimed local actress Roxanne Fay plays heads the six-member cast in the darkly comedic drama set 10 years after the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts. “A witty, somber and thought provoking play,” according to the San Diego Theater Examiner.
Fay starred in Irena’s Vow, last summer’s dramatic production. “I very much enjoy working with Powerstories,” Fay said. “Fran Powers is an inspiring woman.” She also praised artistic director Clareann Despain, who’s directing Witch Hunt.
Fay continued: “I enjoy the challenging nature of the shows, and the ‘demands’ the roles put on me as an artist. We work very hard, but we have a wonderful time doing it. Lots of laughter. And snacks.”
(Find tickets for Witch Hunt here.)
The 25th anniversary season will also include Lauren Gunderson’s Ada and the Engine (Sept. 12-21 at Stageworks) and Tori Sampson’s Cadillac Crew (Nov. 6-16 at The Studio@620).
There’s a lot more to Powerstories than putting plays that have messages onstage. Girlstories Leadership Theatre is a theater arts program for middle school girls; it teaches them confidence and self-awareness though theater, performance, music, art, dance – and leadership. In 2010, Girlstories was awarded the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award – from First Lady Michelle Obama, at the White House.
Each spring, the Voices of Women Theatre Festival showcases original plays from novice and veteran women playwrights.
And Powerstories offers storytelling workshops via Zoom, which are explained in detail at this link.
Despite the lack of a permanent performance space, Powerstories continues to thrive, a quarter-century into the journey. “We’re still struggling, but not in a bad way,” Powers explained. “We’re still moving forward, upwards, backwards and all around. It’s just the evolution of theater and art, you know? And the ups and downs with it.”
She remains proud that her unusual, nonprofit theater company has no commercial aspirations whatsoever. “I like to do the things that are meaningful, and are going to be transformative in some way, shape or form, for the actors and/or the audience.”
Girlstories Leadership Theatre.
