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| Jeanmarie Simpson Photo by Dan Bishop |
by Gil Benbrook
For over a decade, Arizona Theatre Matters has carved out a distinctive place in the Valley's arts community by producing thought-provoking work and embracing the idea that theatre can be both artistically engaging and socially meaningful. At the center of that mission is Jeanmarie Simpson, the company's Founding Artistic Director, whose career as an actor, playwright, director, and educator has given her a unique perspective on the many ways theatre can connect, challenge, and teach.
When the COVID-19 pandemic brought live, in-person performances to a halt, Arizona Theatre Matters found a new way to reach audiences by making its work available online as free, fully acted out audio plays with sound effects and featuring American Sign Language interpretation and closed captioning. That evolution reflects Simpson's continuing interest in accessibility and in expanding the ways audiences can experience theatre. It also speaks to the company's belief that artists can serve as teachers, helping us better understand history, one another, and the world around us.
As Arizona Theatre Matters looks toward its next chapter, including the inaugural Glendale International Fringe Festival next February, Simpson remains as creatively active as ever. In this interview, she discusses the company's beginnings and future, her prolific playwriting career, her fascination with historical figures, the challenges facing theatre today, and the opportunities she sees ahead for artists and audiences alike.
Over your career you’ve worn a lot of hats, including playwright, actor, director, and educator. Why do you think it’s important to have experience in various aspects of theatre, and which of these titles is the one you most enjoy?
Jeanmarie Simpson: "I began making original work when I was twelve and directing when I was fifteen. Acting, directing, writing, producing, and teaching have never felt like separate forms to me. I can only say that when I write, the actor, educator and director are there, too. We’re all me, and I can’t compartmentalize myself.
Since shortly after the advent of Covid, I have been visited by a muse who seems to have moved in for good. That still astonishes me. Some plays come to me in the night. My last half a dozen plays essentially arrived and wrote themselves.
I used to crochet, knit, quilt, garden, and bake bread. Now I become antsy and go back to writing. I no longer have hobbies. I have tributaries.
So the title I most enjoy is theatre artist, and what I most want to do tomorrow morning is write."
You are also the Founding Artistic Director of Arizona Theatre Matters, which started in 2012. What was the impetus for Arizona Theatre Matters?
"The fuse was lit in 2003, when I was still running the Nevada Shakespeare Company. We opened a production at the brand-new Nevada Museum of Art, a supposedly state-of-the-art building, and I was gobsmacked by what they were calling accessibility. There was Braille at the elevators, but why wasn’t it alongside the English interpretation in the galleries? Then the museum opened a world-touring Frida Kahlo exhibition without Spanish-language interpretation or multilingual wayfinding in a state with an enormous Latin American population. This was 2003, not 1957.
I tried to move Nevada Shakespeare toward universal design, and it was a battle. My board could barely wrap its collective head around mixed casting. When I cast an Asian actor as Demetrius, I thought I was going to be fired. Directors scoffed at the idea that universal access had anything to do with theatre and turned down work rather than engage with it.
I left Nevada in 2007. Five years later, I was back in my native state, living in Tucson, and still finding theatres without basic things like elevators or doorways wide enough for wheelchairs. People who used wheelchairs were segregated from the rest of the audience, and there was almost no consideration of Blind and Deaf artists or audiences.
So in 2012, I founded Universal Access Productions, which became Arizona Theatre Matters. I planned to produce live theatre with and for people who had been excluded from it. I quickly discovered that even wildly expensive institutional theatres were simply not made for everyone."
Around the tenth anniversary of Arizona Theatre Matters, shortly after Covid shut all live, in-person theatre performances down, you shifted to having a YouTube presence where all of the works are available, for free, as ASL-described audio plays. How did that decision happen, and what have you learned from it?
"Covid did not create our interest in digital theatre, but it removed any possibility of postponing it. I had spent years trying to bring more people into buildings that had never been designed for them. Suddenly, none of us could enter the buildings.
The form developed through the artists themselves. Diana Kimetto founded Radiant Voices, our Blind voice-acting ensemble, and Ololade Adekanmi founded Hands in Harmony, our Deaf Artistic Sign Language ensemble. Bringing those artists together gave us something much more interesting than a conventional play recorded for the internet.
I should clarify one point in the question: the productions are not “ASL-described audio plays.” The spoken performance, Artistic Sign Language, audio description, captioning, sound, and visual environment are distinct elements. Our Deaf performers are not translating a finished audio production. Their work is one of the performances from which the production is made.
The audience grew production by production. Heretic: The Mary Dyer Story and Pineapple and Other Options each reached tens of thousands of viewers. Our six-production digital festival in 2022 received more than 150,000 views. We now have more than 120,000 subscribers, over 2.5 million views, and viewers in 194 countries. Our captions can be experienced in more than 300 languages.
What surprised me most was the continuing life of the work. A live production closes, the set comes down, and the audience becomes a memory. Our YouTube productions continue finding new viewers months and years after they premiere.
I no longer think we must choose between digital and live theatre. GIFF brings us together physically in Glendale’s public libraries, while our YouTube channel allows people everywhere else to participate. The two forms feed each other.
Everything on the channel is free. Subscribers are also the first to know when something new arrives."
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| The Arizona Theatre Matters team on a break while recording in 2024 at Albion Studio in Mesa |
Why does Arizona Theatre Matters believe artists are our teachers?
"This belief begins with my own uneven mind.
I know from my life that ability is not a fixed quantity that appears in exactly the same way under every set of conditions. Shortly after Covid, I began writing with a force and frequency I had never experienced before. I had not suddenly acquired a different mind. Something in the conditions had changed, and play after play began to emerge.
That experience led to the question at the heart of Uneven Minds: What becomes possible when conditions change?
It has also changed the way I understand artists. My job is not to construct a room, invite an artist into it, and then judge what that artist can do under the conditions I have established. I need to learn from the artist what conditions allow their work to emerge, and then allow their presence to change the room.
A Blind actor does more than identify a place where my narration is unclear. That actor may reveal an entirely different way for the story to inhabit sound. A Deaf Artistic Sign Language performer does more than provide another means of receiving words. That artist may uncover the visual, spatial, rhythmic, and emotional life of the play. The production changes because that particular artist is making it.
When we call ourselves apprentices to the artists with whom we work, we mean that we expect our assumptions to be challenged. We expect the process, the structure, and sometimes the work itself to become something we could not have designed before those artists entered it.
If all I learn from an artist is how to make my original idea work, I have been so busy protecting the blueprint that I missed the shooting star."
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| Jeanmarie Simpson in A Single Woman The Culture Project, Off-Broadway, 2005 |
Throughout your career, including your most well-known work, “A Single Woman,” you’ve often focused on historical figures. Why are you drawn to them, and why do you think it’s important for these stories, many that we already know, to be told again?
"I begin when someone gets under my skin and refuses to leave.
In 2002, I was on the Carnegie Hall website for an entirely unrelated reason when I encountered Jeannette Rankin. I considered myself a reasonably well-informed feminist, yet I had never heard of the first woman elected to Congress. I was astonished, and annoyed. Then I saw her statement, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” I knew I had found the theatrical voice I had been searching for throughout my adult life. Her Montana-Western speech patterns felt familiar to me. Her feminism and pacifism were not abstract positions; she had allowed them to determine what she did when the consequences were enormous.
I bought every book I could find and printed all 283 pages of her oral history.
For much of my acting life, I had found myself standing up for the character I was playing. With Rankin, I found a character who stood up for me.
Writing A Single Woman and then performing it again and again, across years, states, and countries, made my relationship with Rankin extraordinarily intimate. The public version of her can be reduced to a few phrases: the first woman in Congress, a pacifist, the lone vote against entering World War II after Pearl Harbor. All of those things are true, but they are not a human being.
That’s why Jeannette bakes bread and makes lemonade during A Single Woman. I wasn’t interested in polishing a statue. I wanted political courage to occupy a body, with hands, habits, humor, irritation, appetite, and work to do while the audience was experiencing her life.
I am often drawn to the person standing just outside the familiar historical frame. Most people know Joan of Arc. I became fascinated by her mother, Isabelle Romée, who lived for twenty-four years after her daughter’s execution and then petitioned the Church to clear Joan’s name. We know the girl at the stake. I wanted to know the mother and the rest of the family after the crowd dispersed.
Mary Dyer is remembered as a Quaker martyr, if she is remembered at all. I needed to encounter the woman and mother who understood precisely what awaited her in Boston and continued walking toward it. I wanted to understand why she left her family, including a six-month-old child, for seven years, and why she went to the gallows in Boston rather than returning to home, hearth, and safety in Rhode Island.
The moment someone becomes entirely admirable, symbolic, or safely dead, I lose interest. Most people do.
If I can make only a saint or a villain, there is no play. I research until the facts become part of my nervous system, and then I listen for the contradictions, private costs, unanswered questions, and choices that still feel alive. I always learn, and every project compels me to keep learning.
We may believe we already know these stories, but often what we know is a caption beneath a photograph. I don’t tell them again because they are old, or because “history repeats itself.” I tell them because the version we inherited is too small.
Also, if I don’t write them, I’ll die. It’s a medical condition, this inspiration disease."
You’re a prolific playwright, so let’s talk about some of your recent works, how you got the idea for them and what you hope audiences take away from them?:
- “On Track,” your new play about peace activist S. Brian Willson, and the challenge of dramatizing a life still being lived.
I began working on On Track twenty-two years ago because I was fascinated by the enormous distance Brian had traveled within a single lifetime. He grew up wanting to be an FBI agent. He believed in American exceptionalism and supported the war in Viet Nam. He entered the Air Force, witnessed what that war was doing to civilians, and found himself unable to continue believing what he had been taught.
Years later, he sat on the railroad tracks at the Concord Naval Weapons Station to prevent munitions from being shipped to Central America. The train ran over him, nearly killed him, and took both of his legs.
That is the event of which most people are aware. I wanted to understand everything that made it possible for Brian to be sitting there, and everything required of him after he survived.
My first problem was that Brian has actually lived many lives, and I tried to write all of them. At one point, On Track was a two-and-a-half-hour epic with seventy-five characters. It had the scope of a five-volume Russian novel.
Mathew Zimmerer accepted the role of Brian in that version. Mathew is a fantastic Phoenix Metro actor, and I knew immediately that he could handle the contradictions in Brian without trying to resolve them for the audience.
When I knew GIFF was going to happen, On Track became part of the Festival from the outset. I also knew the existing play could not simply be squeezed into a Fringe time slot. It needed a different form. I sculpted the two-and-a-half-hour, multi-character epic into a one-hour solo piece for Mathew.
It is not merely a shorter version of the old play. The center of gravity changed. Instead of watching several characters surround Brian and describe parts of his world, the audience remains with Brian while that world moves through him. Memories, letters, military evaluations, government communications, and encounters with other people all enter the performance, but Mathew does not present a parade of impersonations. He remains Brian while allowing those other forces to be heard.
That makes the role much more demanding. Mathew must move through the child Brian was, the young patriot, the military officer, the veteran, the resister, and the older man examining all of them. He also has to let us see that these are not tidy stages in a moral ascent. The earlier selves do not disappear when the later Brian understands more. He carries them all.
Brian recently watched a video of our latest rehearsal of Mathew’s solo performance. His response confirmed what I had believed from the beginning: Mathew is tremendous in the role. That meant a great deal to me because Brian was seeing Mathew carry the entire play alone.
Writing about someone who is still alive means the subject can remember differently, disagree, reconsider, or tell me I have something factually wrong. Brian and his friend and assistant, Preston Harp, have examined the play with a fine-toothed comb and helped make the historical record as accurate as possible. That kind of cooperation is an extraordinary gift.
It does not remove the playwright’s responsibility. Facts still have to become theatre. I have to decide what belongs in the hour, where memory gives way to documentation, what the audience needs to witness, and what can remain unspoken. The life belongs to Brian. The dramatic composition is mine. I have to honor both truths at once.
As I wrote, one image emerged: Brian carrying water. I don’t mean that as a grand declaration. I mean the repetitive work of responding to what he knew, day after day, after the attention had moved elsewhere. That interested me more than treating the action on the tracks as one isolated heroic gesture.
I don’t want audiences to leave thinking that Brian was born with some moral clarity the rest of us lack. He wasn’t. He was ambitious, prejudiced, patriotic, capable of violence, and eager to believe the national story he had inherited. What distinguishes him is that he eventually allowed what he witnessed to change the way he lived. That is why I regard him as a spectacular example of humanity. Not because he was born morally clear, but because he wasn’t.
On Track will receive its first full staging at GIFF, with Mathew performing the solo eleven times before a live audience. Afterward, we will record it for Arizona Theatre Matters’ YouTube channel so it can be experienced free by audiences around the world.
I have spent twenty-two years trying to find the theatrical form for Brian’s story. GIFF finally gave me the reason to make the hardest and most liberating change: trusting one actor, one hour, and the audience’s ability to remain in the room with him."
- “Mackers,” a haunted backstage send-up of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play.
"Mackers came overnight. Literally. I woke up in the middle of the night, started writing, and had a first draft by morning. I wasn’t looking for the idea. It arrived with Frankie, an Italian American stage manager from the Bronx, and an entire theatre company in crisis.
The play follows the first preview of The Scottish Play. Shakespeare’s scenes unfold while Frankie narrates and tries to keep the production alive. Each time the forbidden name is spoken, something goes wrong. By intermission, the company is frightened enough to consider removing the name from the remainder of the performance, which presents certain difficulties when it belongs to the title character.
What interests me is what pressure reveals about the company. These people are skilled, vain, exhausted, superstitious, profane, loyal, and completely dependent upon one another. They can be fighting viciously backstage and still catch whoever is falling when the cue comes.
I never try to decide what audiences should take away from a play. Once it reaches them, it belongs to them. I hope they laugh very hard and become invested in whether this impossible company reaches curtain call. Whatever else they find about superstition, Shakespeare, backstage labor, loyalty, or the perils of “the show must go on” is theirs.
We originally planned to release Mackers this Halloween, but the production has been postponed until 2027. I am choosing not to interpret that as evidence. It will premiere free on Arizona Theatre Matters’ YouTube channel, assuming the Scottish Play permits it."
- “Uneven Minds,” and the question at its heart: What becomes possible when conditions change?
"Uneven Minds is different from the plays because it is an evolving interdisciplinary inquiry. I spoke earlier about the personal and artistic experiences from which it grew, so I won’t retrace them here.
The question at its center, “What becomes possible when conditions change?”, is not rhetorical. I don’t know the answer, and I don’t want the initiative to manufacture one. If we already knew what people would discover, whose capacities would emerge, or how the work would change, we would be demonstrating a thesis rather than pursuing an inquiry.
The October presentation includes a humanities response and public conversation because the inquiry must be changed by the people who enter it. It has already expanded through Rosemarie’s involvement. She is a supernova: scholar, professor, Poet Laureate of Phoenix, with an undergraduate degree in anthropology. I mean, talk about refusing to be pigeonholed! I’m so excited to have a public discussion about this work with her."
What do you see next in Arizona Theatre Matters’ future?
"What comes next is one path with three parallel trajectories: Mainstage, Education, and Festival. Each one feeds the others. A play can open an educational inquiry. An educational inquiry can change how we make the next play. The Festival creates a live home for work that may later travel through Mainstage to audiences around the world.
The next public step is An Uneven Mind: Trauma, Creativity, and the Human Experience on October 24, 2026, at the Glendale Main Library. It combines performance and autoethnography with a humanities response from Rosemarie Dombrowski and a public conversation. The event will be recorded and later shared through our YouTube channel. Beyond that presentation, our artists and artist-educators are developing Uneven Minds through workshops, professional development, facilitator training, and our What Becomes Possible? methodology.
Around the Winter Solstice, Midnight at the Algorithm & Blues will premiere free on our YouTube channel. The play takes place at Grant’s Tomb and brings Ulysses and Julia Grant into contact with the America that followed them, including an America increasingly informed, framed, and sold by algorithms.
Then the Fringe Festival in February. Someone can enter this path through an educational event at the library, a Mainstage production online, or a Festival performance in Glendale. If they join us in October, subscribe for Midnight around the Winter Solstice, and come to GIFF in February, they won’t be sampling three unrelated programs. They’ll be traveling the path with us."
What are some of the challenges you feel are most pressing to post-COVID theatre?
"We are living in a post-Covid world, and theatre is different because we are different. We learned so much about ourselves and one another: how desperately we need connection, how differently people can experience the same circumstances, how much unseen labor holds our lives together, and how quickly “normal” can vanish.
We learned that gathering in a room is precious. We also learned that presence doesn’t require everyone to be in the same room. Theatre crossed borders, entered people’s homes, and reached audiences who had rarely, or never, been able to enter our buildings. I don’t want us to retreat into an argument about whether live or digital theatre is the real thing. They create different kinds of encounters. Both are real. Both matter.
We also learned that people are not inexhaustible. Theatre has romanticized low wages, punishing schedules, and sleep deprivation for far too long. I have never believed in “hell week.” Keeping people at work until three in the morning is not evidence of artistic commitment. Usually, it is evidence that somebody made a terrible schedule. We can make extraordinary work without devouring the people who make it.
Then there is money. Artists must be paid. Production costs have risen. Audiences are struggling too. If our only answer is to keep raising ticket prices, theatre will keep shrinking its own public. We need public investment, civic partnerships, and new models that don’t make artists and audiences finance the entire future of the form between them.
The greatest challenge may be remembering what we learned. I don’t want theatre to spend the next decade trying to reconstruct 2019. Covid forced us to become inventive, flexible, attentive, and sometimes far more humane. We proved that theatre could transform overnight when it had no choice.
Now comes the fabulous part: choosing to transform because we have lots of choices."
What is the one thing that most excites you about the theatre community today?
"The artists. Always the artists.
What excites me most is their refusal to accept the limits they have inherited. They are not waiting for institutions to give them permission. They are creating work in libraries, online, in storefronts, on sidewalks, in languages and forms the old systems never learned how to recognize. They are finding one another across geography, discipline, age, culture, and ways of communicating, then making something none of them could have made alone.
I see artists asking better questions. Who has been missing from the room? Who was expected to adapt before being allowed inside? What happens when sign, sound, captioning, movement, language, technology, and lived experience are present from the beginning of the creative process? Not added afterward. Not treated as services. Present at conception.
That thrills me because every time the room changes, the art changes. It becomes stranger, funnier, more beautiful, less obedient, and far more alive.
After all these years, I still walk into a room with artists and think, “I have absolutely no idea what is about to happen.”
That is my favorite place in the world."
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