Scenic City Shakespeare grew out of a long creative partnership between Ryan Laskowski and Emma Collins, who met in Chattanooga State’s Professional Actor Training Program and began collaborating in 2009. In the fall of 2019, they began building a company around a simple idea: Chattanooga deserved a Shakespeare company of its own. Scenic City Shakespeare was formally organized as a Tennessee nonprofit in January 2020 with a mission “to serve the Scenic City by producing great theatre and education programs that engage and inspire.”
Almost immediately, COVID-19 closed stages around the world. Scenic City Shakespeare responded by developing #RemoteTheatre, a live green-screen performance style that brought actors performing from their homes across the country together on a shared virtual stage. During 2020, SCS produced three full-length Shakespeare adaptations remotely. The company also hosted monthly Shakespeare 2020 Project meetups and the Halloween@Home stream-a-thon, which featured the online world-premiere reading of Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s Frankenstein. The work earned attention well beyond Chattanooga and allowed the young company to grow during a period when conventional live theatre was impossible.
After more than a year online, Scenic City Shakespeare returned to in-person performance with All Together Now! in November 2021. In May 2022, the company finally realized a project first planned before the pandemic: free Shakespeare in Chattanooga’s parks. An original musical adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost launched Scenic City Shakespeare in the Park at Greenway Farms, with an additional performance at East Lake Park. Strong attendance led directly to Hamlet that fall and established the spring-and-fall Shakespeare in the Park tradition that continues today.
Since then, Scenic City Shakespeare has developed a growing repertory at Greenway Farms while expanding its educational work and increasing artist compensation. In 2026, Othello opened the company’s fifth season of free Shakespeare in the Park alongside a new paid student apprenticeship program. Across every stage of that history, the founding commitment has remained consistent: make ambitious theatre accessible to the community while valuing the artists who create it.
Every Show Free. Every Artist Paid.
