Wilma Theater receives special Tony Award for regional theater

Leigh Goldenberg, managing director at the Wilma Theater, had just wrapped up a strenuous budget meeting earlier this month when the office phone rang. It was the Broadway League, with a special message: The Wilma Theater will receive the 2024 Regional Theatre Tony Award.

”I just started mouthing the word ‘Tony’ to Lindsay [Smiling, co-artistic director] and he started freaking out,” Goldenberg said, laughing.

There was an eruption of joyful shouts at the offices above the theater at Broad and Spruce Streets, followed by many phone calls and popping of champagne corks.

The Wilma is the first theater in Pennsylvania to receive the award, which recognizes “a regional theatre company that has displayed a continuous level of artistic achievement contributing to the growth of theatre nationally,” according to a statement from the Tony Awards administration committee. It also includes a grant of $25,000.

”The Wilma has made outstanding contributions to the world of theatre over the course of 45 years, maintaining an unwavering dedication to contemporary theatre and a commitment to the arts that began with its visionary introduction of avant-garde theatre to Philadelphia in 1979,” Heather Hitchens, president and CEO of the American Theatre Wing, and Jason Laks, interim president of the Broadway League, said in a statement on Wednesday announcing the award.

The theater was recommended by the American Theatre Critics Association, and the Tony Awards are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing.

One of Goldenberg’s first calls was to Danny Feldman, head of Pasadena Playhouse in California, which received the regional theater award in 2023. “We know this moment is coming one time, we have to make the most of it,” said Goldenberg.

“He was just like, ‘OK, your life’s about to change.’”

Founded in 1973 as an avant-garde theater project committed to local actors, the Wilma is renowned for its experimental, boundary-pushing work. The theater has worked with cutting-edge playwrights including Paula Vogel, Tom Stoppard, and Danai Gurira.

Last year, it became the first independent Philadelphia theater to receive a Tony Award nomination for serving as a coproducer of Fat Ham’s Broadway run. The Black queer spin on Hamlet had first premiered as a Wilma digital streaming production in 2021, winning a Pulitzer Prize before it was staged in front of a live audience in 2023. It went on to receive five Tony nominations, including best play, but came up empty-handed.

Now, the Wilma Theater will now finally bring a Tony trophy to the city.

“To put Philadelphia theater on the map with this award is a thrill for us, [as is] to bring more people looking to Philadelphia as a place for great art in the realm of theater,” said Smiling, who was previously an actor in the Wilma’s resident acting company, HotHouse.

» READ MORE: What the 2023 Tony Awards Meant for Philadelphia's arts community

“I feel incredibly moved that it’s a Tony that’s acknowledging the entire theater, not just one play or one person, because everyone works so hard and nobody’s paid enough,” said co-artistic director Morgan Green, who also directed the premiere of Fat Ham. “My hope is that this fills the house.”

Green was part of the first cohort of the Wilma’s shared leadership model. Russian director Yury Urnov, Fat Ham playwright James Ijames, and Green were the first co-artistic directors named in 2020, a month before COVID arrived. The theater’s cofounder, Blanka Zizka, who ran the Wilma for decades with her husband, Jiri, brought the trio together for an experiment in collective leadership that’s rare in American theater. (Last year, Ijames stepped down and Smiling was tapped to replace him.)

“We came into these positions like a week before the pandemic hit, so these five years felt like working uphill — it’s uphill, uphill, uphill work,” said Urnov. “Then suddenly this [award] comes in and you’re like, ‘OK, [all that work] made sense.’”

“It’s the legitimizing of the work, especially because the Wilma makes weird stuff,” said Goldenberg.

Amid the pandemic lockdown and reopening, the Wilma embraced experimentation, including pivoting to digital streaming productions, like Fat Ham; recording an audio play in quarantine; and building socially distant staging inspired by Shakespeare’s Globe. Recent years have also seen several buzzy world premieres of timely shows, like Passage and My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion, as well as collaborations like 10 Days in a Madhouse and the eagerly anticipated rock opera Hilma, about the life and art of Swedish abstract painting pioneer Hilma af Klint, which opens June 4.

The leadership team expects the Tony to raise awareness of the Wilma’s work overall, which they hope will help boost ticket sales (on Broad Street or online) and attract investments by major donors.

In April, the theater announced its 2024-2025 season, featuring Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ comedy The Comeuppance, Inua Ellams’ epic poem The Half-God of Rainfall, Rajiv Joseph’s twist on WWI history Archduke, and Jon Fosse’s time-blurring drama A Summer Day.

The Broadway League, Goldenberg said, acknowledged the history of the theater as a whole, and were especially impressed with “how we set an example coming through COVID.”

This Tony Award is among the few announced before the ceremony, which will take place at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on June 16, with a live broadcast airing on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.