The Brooklyn Rail

Down a dead-end street off Wyckoff Avenue, past a liquor store and across from a beverage distribution center, the Bushwick Starr has been reborn.

It feels, admitted co-founder and artistic director Noel Allain, like “a miracle.”

“It’s all extraordinary to me,” said Allain on a recent tour, gazing around the new space. “It is a dream come true.”

There have been some speed bumps since Allain and Sue Kessler, the Starr’s co-founder and creative director, announced in September 2021 that the Starr would construct a new home at 419 Eldert Street. At the time, they projected that construction would be completed within one year. In the end, it took three.

It has been an even longer road since June 2020, when the Starr team first learned that the theater’s longtime space on Starr Street would be converted into residential housing. Suddenly, amidst a traumatic period of fear and isolation, a home that the company had built lovingly over thirteen years was gone.

But on September 6, 2024, Allain and Kessler stood before a gathering of friends, artists and elected officials to cut the ribbon on their new 2.2 million dollar home.

Speaking before the crowd, board co-chair Michael Contini acknowledged that seeking a new home for the Starr—a space to buy, not lease—had been a risky move: “We doubled down, and decided to invest in ourselves,” he said.

The completed building, converted from a raw warehouse, includes a lobby space, rehearsal studio, scene shop, office suite, and dressing room. The performance space, a flexible black box, is the exact same square footage as the Starr’s former home.

“We have central air!” exclaimed Allain while showing off the performance space to the Rail. “It’s on, and you can’t hear anything.” (A large and decidedly noisier industrial heater hung obtrusively from the ceiling at Starr Street.)

Audiences will enjoy that quiet air beginning October 15 when Julia May Jonas’s A Woman Among Women, a modern-day riff on Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, opens the new season.

The Starr re-opens its doors at a moment when the city is losing new work spaces. Soho Rep will depart its sixty-five-seat home on Walker Street at the beginning of next year, shortly after Second Stage Theater loses its longtime off-Broadway venue, the Tony Kiser Theater. Roundabout’s Black Box Theatre, a home for emerging artists through their Underground new work program, is dark for the season. Meanwhile, newly opened venues like the Shed and PAC NYC (Perelman Performing Arts Center) can feel sleek but uninviting, lacking a clear artistic ethos that would fill their shiny interiors with a sense of purpose.

Of course, buildings are not everything. But home, a physical place to welcome its artists and audiences, is important to Allain and Kessler.

“Part of the fabric of what we do at the Starr is to have an actual place to welcome people into,” said Kessler. “It brings me and Noel so much joy to create a place that’s welcoming, and where artists feel guaranteed to be treated well and given a wonderful environment to make their best work.”

The old Starr began as a live-work space for the theater company Fovea Floods, of which Allain and Kessler were original members. Converted from an apartment, it opened in 2007, before the full effects of gentrification had kicked in. The company routinely offered up the space to fellow artists for rentals. Gradually, those became more curated. As the organization grew, it pivoted from the rental model and built up full in-house support for its productions.

Allain recalled Jonas’s early play The Penitent Hours, a rental at the Starr in 2007, as one of the shows that spurred him to shift the Starr’s model and start curating the work on its stage.

“I was like, ‘This is amazing work,’” he recalled. “‘I don’t want to have work here that isn’t this good.’”

That the Starr is now producing Jonas’s work again, seventeen years later, speaks to the theater’s long-term commitment to ongoing relationships with artists.

“I do think of the Starr as my artistic home,” said Jonas. “They’ve been my biggest supporter, artistically, throughout my career.”

Even before they were producing themselves, Jonas noted, the Starr operated generously, offering their space for weeks worth of rehearsal and tech time.

Kessler dubs their subsequent growth “responsible experimentation,” built entirely on listening to artists, identifying their needs and frustrations, and creating a model in response.

“Their ethos is a genuinely artist-centered approach,” said playwright Phillip Howze, who made his New York playwriting debut at the Starr in 2017 with his boldly political work Frontières Sans Frontières. “They read the play that I wrote and said, ‘We would like to produce this play that you wrote, and please can we do it the way that you wrote it.’ That’s it.”

“They believe in the melding of the space to the work,” said Jonas.

Artists have transformed that space into a mini-football field for Half Straddle’s In the Pony Palace/FOOTBALL; a boozy, ghost-filled parlor for Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet; and a jubilant, queer-positive party with Diana Oh’s Infinite Love Party, which invited some audience members to sleep over at the theater.

“I remember [seeing Infinite Love Party] and being like, ‘How can they do this?’” said Jesse Cameron Alick, then-literary manager at the Public and now co-director at HERE Arts Center. “Just thinking about all the complications, all the red tape you’d face at a bigger institution.”

It’s not the only way the Starr has riskily distinguished itself.

The theater released a statement in response to the ongoing war on Gaza and the October 7 attack in Israel. Thorough and considered, it called on representatives to pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza while condemning bigotry, violence, and the ripple effects of imperialism and capitalism across the world.

In releasing the statement, which was sent to the Starr’s mailing list on March 12, the theater confronted a highly charged question when most theater companies had remained silent. (National Queer Theater also released a statement demanding “ceasefire now,” before the Starr in November.)

The Starr’s team did so, as the statement noted, in direct response to a call-in from their artists.

“There are members of our community with loved ones directly impacted by these conflicts; for them, this is far from a distant tragedy but a deeply personal, daily horror,” the statement read. “For those neighbors and friends, we grieve, and we fight for justice.”

“Because of our values, it was important to us to respond, and to say something we believed,” said Allain. “Some of the feedback was not that people disagreed with anything we said but there were things missing.” Later edits to the statement included a call for the release of all hostages and a more forceful condemnation of rising antisemitism.

The obligation on theaters to speak out on world events, and the value of such statements, is a matter of ongoing debate. But for Alick, now a frequent dramaturg on Starr productions, the statement’s engagement with a challenging moment was meaningful.

“We’re in a time period where institutions are very nervous about having conversations, period,” said Alick. “And that’s actually a shame. We live in conversation with our artists, who live in conversation with the world. So we must talk about the world, in all of its complications and all of its difficulty.”

As the Starr moves into its new home, remaining in conversation with artists and being transparent about its values remains a cornerstone. Moving won’t change that, as Allain says, just as bigger space and bigger budget won’t sacrifice intimacy or magic.

“We can do more fun, crazy stuff here,” he said, motioning around the new space. “Because we have, like—”

“Emergency exits,” Kessler deadpanned.

The Starr continued to produce work while homeless by partnering with JAG Productions and ¡Oye! Group on Keelay Gipson’s demons, with the Sol Project, ¡Oye! Group and Musical Theatre Factory on Michelle J. Rodriguez’s Presencia, and with the Public on Dark Disabled Stories, which was honored as a Best New American Play at the Obie Awards.

Still, four years is a long time for any theater to remain itinerant while maintaining a relationship with its audience.

“We have been so aware of that [distance], and it has been a painful part of this process,” said Allain. “We don’t just produce things—we do think of ourselves as a home for people.”

At the same time, the theater’s former space could no longer serve its growing community. The theater was inaccessible, reachable only by climbing a steep and rickety staircase. Beyond performances, fundraisers and other special events attracted more people than the space could accommodate.

“It's important to remember that the Starr wasn't always the supernova it is today; it was once just a little baby Starr,” said Howze. “New York is in need of more baby Starrs. For the future of our art form, we need more gutsy young folks who are eager to band together. We need the folks at the Starr, who will no doubt inspire the next generation of brazen, unhinged art spaces.”