Three years ago, Tess Pohlhaus attended a managers and dramaturges conference in Toronto with friends Liam Daly and Molly Weeks Crumbley.
“A lot of that conference was spent talking about how to make theatre accessible and sometime in the course of that weekend, it came to us, why don’t we start a theater company?” said Pohlhaus.
The company she and Crumbley envisioned would be a nurturing environment for emerging artists, much like the theater department they found when they were students at Washington College.
Fast-forward three years and Zero Hour Theatre Company is becoming a regular sight to see at the Capital Fringe Festival. This was the theater troupe’s third year performing in the festival and Pohlhaus and Crumbley are both Artistic Directors on the company’s Board of Directors.
But the group hasn’t forgotten their Washington College roots. In fact, every member of the Board of Directors is a graduate of the college. Every original play Zero Hour has performed has been penned by a Washington College alum, including their latest 7 Lessons on Suicide by Stephen Spotswood. All but one of the actors in Suicide went to WC. Zero Hour even took an earlier draft of Spotswood’s script to the college in April, invited faculty and students to a staged reading and asked for feedback from the audience.
“We didn’t intend it to be that way,” said Crumbley. “We just all knew each other and liked working together. We work quickly and well together and can get things up fast.”
And a good thing too. Until the Friday before the show, the cast and crew of Suicide had only been able to rehearse in each other’s homes. The first time they saw the gallery they would be performing in was the night their show was set to open. Such is the nature of Fringe festivals, but it didn’t faze Zero Hour.
“I think we had a good understanding of how Fringe festivals worked from our training at school. Had we not had that training and experience, I think it would have been a lot harder,” said Crumbley.
It helps too that a Washington College drama major is expected to be a jack-of-all-trades. No one is just an actor or just a director; you are expected to take tech theater classes, show up to work calls and help other people with their theses, said Marketing Director Kevin Brotzman.
“We learned every part of doing a play so it’s been fairly easy putting up shows of our own,” said Technical Director Mike Meagher.
Of course, there are those challenges that are harder to work around.
The group can’t meet very often because they all work full time, members are scattered all over Maryland and many of them have families.
“We have hectic schedules to begin with so finding time for us to meet is difficult,” said Pohlhaus.
But in the time they have set aside for Zero Hour, the group has not only managed to craft the haven for theater artists they envisioned but put on wonderful and original shows too.
To learn more about Zero Hour, visit their website at www.zerohourtheatre.com
Did you know that since 1988,the art-deco style movie theatre in Church Hill has been a vital center for community theatre? We do at least 5 main productions each year,and have a vital youth program,The Green Room Gang.” Many of our actors and tech people are from the Washington college drama department, and sveral of our plays have come from local playwrites.