River and Rail Theatre Company

Through the power and beauty of theatre, we seek to unite people from all backgrounds to experience and participate in stories that embody our shared humanity.

Life can really blow your plans out of the water sometimes, right? You know…like when you decide to move away from busy New York City life and pursue something quiet and simple in the slower south…and then one day while you are making your bed, you get a call that your father is gone and you are somehow alone in the world in a whole new way. It’s strange how life can feel so fragile and so powerful in these moments, when it forces you to look it in the face and say, “Ok, I see you.” When I learned about my father’s death, life suddenly became temporary for me. Urgent. Precious. This is how River & Rail Theatre company was born. Out of an urgency, a need to live, to tell the good stories, to do it all now while we can. In late 2014, some good friends at Gridwell came around our urgent desires to make theatre that is honest, relevant, and beautiful, and they helped us sculpt a vision for a professional theatre company with a community heart. We came up with two images: the river and the rail. We latched onto the idea, because the river and the rail are emblematic of Knoxville’s proud, industrious past. The heart of downtown Knoxville is situated between these two modes of transit, and we owe much of our city’s identity and growth to both. Together, they are intrinsically and inseparably Knoxville. But the river and the rail also represent a sort of separation. When you look at the demographics of Knoxville, the people that live on the river and the people that live near the tracks experience Knoxville from vastly different perspectives. Our neighborhoods, churches, community groups, and social circles seem deeply divided along various lines. Some are the literal lines of the Tennessee River or the tracks of the railroad, and some are metaphorical, like the lines between races, religions, and ethnic groups or the cultural lines between East, West, North, and South Knoxville. The goal of River & Rail Theatre is to not just create professional theatre accessible to all Knoxvillians, but to create theatre true to the stories of Knoxville, shared collectively by those on every side of every line.