The Studio Series

at The Arts Center at 12 Main Street on Zoom in 2020

The Arts Center at 12 Main Street is our smaller productions space, where we host our readings and small cast performances. Happening bi-weekly in the summer, and sporadically through the winter, the Studio Series is a space for intimate theater, new work, and discovery.

Out of the Cage ​By Callie Maclntyre

A teen member of our company, Callie MacIntyre, has been diligently working on another wonderful play.  This is her second play, and the second play we are producing in our Studio Series.  We want to continue supporting her development as an actor and as a playwright.  Check out the synopsis of the play below: 

​The Studio Series consists of four readings offered throughout the summer that are directed and read by ATTP’s exceptional company of actors and directors, and then offered to our community for by donation admission. These readings are an opportunity to workshop in-progress work, which means the audience is invited stay after the reading for a Q & A session to share their responses directly with the playwright. All work produced in the reading series is then considered as possible options for Second Stage productions, completely dependent on audience feedback.

Out of the Cage Introduction:

More than two hundred years ago, frustrated with all of the crime present in the city they lived in, a group of politicians, lawmakers, and well-respected members of the community calling themselves “Moralists” came together to form a council that would spend several months going over every possible human action to decide definitively if it were morally right or wrong, and if it were, what the punishment for committing it should be. They believed that by eliminating any sort of “gray area” within the justice system, crime would decrease, because there would be no confusion over whether or not something was morally just, whether that something was lying or taking the life of another human being. After the system was adopted, crime did begin to decrease, as more and more people began proudly calling themselves “Moralists,” with some following the “rules” set forth in the book with something resembling religious fervor, obsessed with being morally “good.” An academy was founded to train so-called “Moral Officers,” scholars of moralism serving as counselors and confessors to wayward souls, sponsored by the moralist government. While most of the citizens were content to follow moralism to at least a casual degree, its emphasis on morality and its refusal to consider differing opinions led to the development of an underground movement called philosophism, which preached the importance of free thought, individuality, and the inclusion of that “gray area” which the moralists so despised. Twenty years before the present, they attempted to take control of the capital building, leading to dozens of deaths as the philosophists refused to back down despite having far fewer weapons, with the moralists eventually agreeing to a compromise just to stop the bloodshed. Believing all of that to be behind them, the current members of the administration are alarmed to receive a letter from the man who led the rebellion all those years ago, informing them that the philosophists are preparing to try again, and perhaps most suspiciously, that he wants to help them stop the attempt. Unsure whether he can be trusted, the establishment sends an inexperienced young officer undercover to find out the truth, but what he discovers in the process sets off an unexpected chain of events that turns even the most carefully laid plans on their head.