It is with a heavy and full heart that I share, on behalf of BSF staff and the BSF Advisory board, the imminent closing of Baltimore Shakespeare Factory.

In my very first year on staff, I remember founding Artistic Director Tom Delise saying, and I’m paraphrasing here, as long as we had the space at St. Mary's, we could survive anything. That was in late 2018 or early 2019. Then 2020 arrived and changed things. We pivoted, we adapted, and we played Shakespeare-based D&D online all summer long that summer. 

COVID came and went, we survived; the building flooded several times, the Diocese repossessed the space and evicted all the remaining tenants at St. Mary's. It hurt, we missed our space, but all we could do was go forward. We took things on the road performing in other spaces, and for a while that was working.

Our focus shifted and we leaned more into our educational programming, for years that and the Nora Roberts grant were what was keeping the metaphorical lights on. It seemed as long as the education department was active, we could make it– smaller than we used to be, paying less than we did before, but still present, still a place for artists in Baltimore to do some nerdy, odd, queer, charmingly obscure and fundamentally iambic Shakespeare productions.  

Earlier this year the teachers we coordinate with to bring theater based English Language Arts workshops to Baltimore area middle schools started sounding the alarm. One of the main grants that helped Howard County schools pay for the programming was on the chopping black, and the outlook wasn’t good. In an environment where the government can’t seem to cut arts funding fast enough, the reliance on grant funding felt like a countdown clock. Ultimately, the 2025-2026 school year was the last foreseeable year there would be county or state level money supporting teaching artists in schools.  

As someone who has been in almost every role someone could be in at a theater (actor, director, teaching artist, Director of Education, Interim Artistic Director, board member, and finally president of the BSF Advisory Board), it seemed most appropriate for me to write this goodbye. I procrastinated writing this because I thought perhaps if we don’t say ‘goodbye’ we can pretend we’re not going. But, alas, go we must. 

My first acting job in the city was with BSF on The Shoemaker’s Holiday. One of the coolest moments in my career (so far) was being invited to speak about directing Elizabeth Cary’s  The Tragedy of Mariam  at the Sorbonne University’s conference about Closet Drama. That production is cited in the textbook Closet Drama in Early Modern England: Theatre Without a Stage edited by Aurélie Griffin and Sophie Lemercier-Goddard. Baltimore Shakespeare Factory holds the record for producing the most productions in Original Pronunciation. Not to mention the hundreds of moments of comedy, sadness, drama and really beautiful theater we've made together over the years.   

 

We did good, kids. It’s been a real, honest-to-goodness, slice of heaven to be a part of the BSF community. Share your best, most cherished BSF memories via social media until December 15th. Share your show photos, and yes, post some slightly-illegal pre-show or intermission music videos. Tag your posts, thoughts, feelings, reels, carriages, stories ect. with #LoveYouBSF.