Why Georgia Ensemble went dark, ending decades of artistic vision, camaraderie
This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
The late Robert “Bob” Farley was fond of telling the story about how he and his wife Anita went out driving in the Atlanta suburbs for more than a year, looking for a space to launch a new theater company after he left his job as artistic director of Alliance Theatre in 1990. The two founded what would become Georgia Ensemble Theatre, with Bob serving as artistic director and Anita as managing director. The company opened in 1992 at the Roswell Cultural Arts Center, served thousands of patrons over the years and collaborated with a “who’s who” of area performers.
On April 19, the Georgia Ensemble Theatre’s Board of Trustees decided to close the company with no fanfare and no public statement or known plans to commemorate the theater and its history.
Anita Farley, as a Georgia Ensemble Theatre board member, was present via Zoom for the meeting and abstained on a vote, along with one other member, to close the company for financial reasons. She doesn’t view the board as the villains, however. “It’s a situation where everyone did the best they could and made decisions based on what they thought was the right decision to make at the time,” she says.
Unexpected problems for the theater date back to 2017 with a series of personal and professional misfortunes. Anita received a cancer diagnosis, and Bob announced his retirement. Former theater professional Alan Kilpatrick was hired to take over as artistic director and choose the upcoming season but had to back away for personal reasons. Three weeks later, Bob passed away unexpectedly.
“There I was without an artistic director, without a husband, in the middle of radiation therapy and trying to figure out ways to make the audience feel there was going to be continuity, and everything was going to go forward just fine,” Anita Farley says.
It was more than six months before she was able to hire artistic assistance. James Donadio came aboard as associate artistic director while she was promoted to producing artistic director. Then the pandemic hit and affected all performing arts organizations. “We were at 3,500 subscribers, everything was looking rosy, and the company had begun rehearsals for the musical ‘Bright Star,’” Farley recalls.
At the time, Georgia Ensemble Theatre was still performing at the Roswell Arts Center, but then the building shut down, and the company was unable to produce. “We had some money coming in from the federal government, but we had no revenue,” Farley says. When they were able to reopen, they could not reach capacity and went further in debt. In 2023, the Roswell Cultural Arts Center canceled its contract with the company
In a move Farley called naïve, the company relocated to Jennie T. Anderson Theatre in Marietta later that year. Loyal patrons did not follow, however. The troupe’s subscriber base shrunk from 3,500 to 1,500, and Farley knew that was not sustainable. So in 2024, Georgia Ensemble Theatre took over a small, 100-seat space at Act3 Playhouse in Sandy Springs. By this time, the company was down to 500 subscribers.
Furthermore, the new location really was not Georgia Ensemble’s model.
“We had no experience producing under those circumstances,” Farley says. “We went into more debt. Little by little, it was a downward spiral, and the board was seeing that.”
Realizing she had more health issues — which she felt were brought on by stress and anxiety — Farley stepped down in December 2024. Unable to maintain her home in Marietta, she moved to Brunswick. “It was a series of circumstances that no one could anticipate,” she says.
Farley’s daughter, Laurel Farley Crowe — who had worked in various capacities at Georgia Ensemble Theatre over the years, including becoming education director in 2011 — took over as interim artistic director in 2024. “She inherited a horrible situation,” Farley says. “Scaling down for someone who had never been an artistic director or a managing director was very challenging, and we did not have the money to hire the ancillary staff. She and Mary (Saville, the company’s communications director) were left out there floundering.”
Crowe ultimately resigned on March 29. Saville stayed on as the only full-time employee. Shortly after Crowe’s departure, the board directed the theater to cancel the upcoming production (and tour) of “A Wrinkle in Time” and then all camps. Georgia Ensemble Theatre’s final main stage production was “Forbidden Broadway: Greatest Hits,” which ran March 13-29 this year. The show is a 2025-2026 Suzi Bass Award nominee.
The company is perhaps best known for its productions of the Holocaust edition play, “And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank,” which was first staged as part of the 1997-1998 season and almost every year after that. It toured elementary and middle schools across the state and will be produced later this year by Synchronicity Theatre, directed by Saville.
Farley is also proud of the musical “Calendar Girls,” especially the fact that Georgia Ensemble was the first theater company in the United States to get the rights to it. She calls the 2015 production “one of the most perfect shows the company ever staged.”
Approaching the board meeting on April 19, Farley felt there was a sense of inevitability about what would happen. She expects the board to make a formal announcement about the closing but — after more than four months — is not sure when that will be.
ArtsATL reached out to the board, including board president Katherine Parvis, multiple times with questions about the closing, as well as the status of the company’s recent grant from the Fulton County Department of Arts & Culture and where those funds would go. None of those messages were returned.
Georgia Ensemble Theatre was a place for both comfort and risk, Saville says. “We have never been the place to do the most edgy, out-there programming — or the most safe. We wanted the broadest tent we could make.”
For Crowe, the loss feels like a death that she is now mourning. The theatre represented her teen years, her career and the thousand “incredible” students whose lives she got to touch. She calls the secrecy at which the board has proceeded and given no public notice “unfair to the artists, staff and students and all the people over the last 34 years who believed in what we do.”
Among those people are Tess Malis Kincaid and her husband Mark, who moved back from New York City to help Bob and Anita with Georgia Ensemble Theatre in 1993. They all spent long days and nights making calls and doing all the grassroots work needed to get the theater started. Kincaid worked with the company in various roles from those early days until 2017 and called it an artistic home of sorts for her family, with she and Mark acting and teaching classes in summer camp.
Kincaid says the closing is a huge loss for Atlanta. “I’m sad for the artists and for the communities who will no longer experience the often beautiful work that was created on those suburban stages.”
Atlanta playwright Topher Payne met Bob Farley in 2009, and the company staged his “Tokens of Affection” in 2011. In all, he premiered six shows at the company.
Payne feels he learned numerous lessons from working with the Farleys, which he later used when he started writing for the Hallmark Channel.
“There was a fundamental respect for the audience, always taking into consideration who the listener is, where they are coming from, what they are bringing in the door so you are never not moving the needle forward,” Payne says.
He is still processing the closing: “The principles of selfless ensemble collaboration at Georgia Ensemble Theatre that were part of its founding, and its mission were so beautifully part of how they did business. The values that were put forward were still going strong three decades in. It’s such a testament to the caliber of the collaborators that attracted who consistently came back.”
There’s a reason, he says, that area artists such Shannon Eubanks, Rob Cleveland and Kincaid, who were there in the beginning, were doing shows with the company 20 years later. They believed in the mission and believed the company was successful in implementing that mission.
Payne has been in Atlanta for 27 years and is heartbroken to see so many institutions that defined Atlanta theater either facing scenarios like this or serious challenges to continue thriving.
Yet this loss is particularly tough. “I was concerned that the company’s legacy would not be protected in this transition, and the lack of communication from the people that made that decision bears out that fear.”
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Jim Farmer covers theater and film for ArtsATL. A graduate of the University of Georgia, he has written about the arts for 30-plus years. Jim is the festival director of Out on Film, Atlanta’s LGBTQ film festival, and lives in Avondale Estates with his husband, Craig.
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