Love Philly? So do we. Let’s be friends. Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today.
Quintessence Theatre Group is Philadelphia’s home for progressive classic theatre. Housed in the historic Sedgwick Theatre, the group takes classic plays and works of literature and presents them for modern audiences.
“The timeless stories that are still relevant and really look at how we as human beings have evolved, and also how we haven’t evolved,” said artistic director Alex Burns.
“There can be something quite comforting in going back to these old stories and realizing that everything that you’re seeing now has been done before,” added executive director Erica Ezold. “That nothing is new in terms of challenges, but maybe there’s something to be learned from that as well.”
“Mt. Airy is kind of poo-poohed on” by many who call it a suburb of Philadelphia, said Burns, who grew up in the Northwest Philly neighborhood. “But it’s truly one of the greatest, to me, neighborhoods in Philadelphia – a city of many great neighborhoods.”
That’s why Quintessence and fellow Mt. Airy-based Lantern Theatre Company hope the area becomes a sort of “Avenue of the Arts Northwest.”
The Sedgwick Theater opened in 1928 as a movie palace, but stopped showing movies in 1966 and became a warehouse. In 1994, local residents purchased it and transformed it into a cultural center that eventually closed in 2004. Quintessence was part of a group that teamed up to bring the space back, and performances started in 2010.
Quintessence aims to renovate the former movie palace building “to create dedicated spaces for education, spaces that we can use for community gatherings and community groups to come and be part of what we do here. And really also allow us to expand our programming, as well,” Ezold said.
