Our Mission, Vision, Values
& Commitment
Our Mission
Annex Theatre is a democratic collective of theatre artists dedicated to creating bold new work in an environment of improbability, resourcefulness, and risk.
Annex annually produces plays by living playwrights and helmed by local directors, ranging from radical reinterpretations of classic scripts and ensemble-generated devised spectacles to dynamic solo performances and evocatively relevant plays. All productions are chosen by the Annex company through a process of proposals, interviews, frenzied argument, and final consensus.
Our Vision
We imagine a theatre that refuses neutrality.
Annex envisions a future where stories are not filtered for comfort or commercial appeal, where marginalized voices are not invited as guests but recognized as essential, and where experimentation is not tolerated but demanded. We believe fringe theatre is where culture mutates, where new forms are born, and where the most urgent questions are asked out loud.
We want audiences who come ready to feel something—to be unsettled, energized, to feel themselves cracked open at their core—and artists who are trusted to take risks without apology.
Our Values
Annex exists for artists. We prioritize creative freedom, consent, and growth over polish and profit. New artists are supported without condescension; veteran artists are encouraged to break their own rules. This is a place to experiment loudly and learn in public.
Belonging Without Exception
Annex is for everyone. We are proudly LGBTQIA2S+, anti-racist, disability-affirming, and aligned with social justice movements that seek equity and liberation. We work to remove barriers—financial, physical, cultural, and systemic—so artists and audiences alike can fully participate. You do not have to explain yourself to belong here.
Fringe as a Force
We embrace the fringe as a space of invention, disruption, and possibility. Our work lives at the edges, too strange, too new, too personal, or too risky for more conventional stages, and we celebrate that. At Annex, experimentation is not a phase; it’s a value. We empower our production teams to run with their ideas, to let their creativity flow, and our role is to support its manifestation.
Story as Catalyst
We believe stories change people, and people change communities. Theatre can hold grief, spark joy, provoke questions, revel in absurdity and invite empathy across difference. We seek narratives that are cathartic, energizing, unsettling, funny, and deeply alive. We seek work that challenges dominant narratives and invites audiences into deeper empathy and sharper awareness.
Community as
Co-Conspirator
Annex is not just a stage—it’s a gathering place. We believe theatre happens between people: artists, audiences, volunteers, neighbors, strangers, friends. We aim to foster connection, conversation, and shared experience, recognizing that community is not passive—it’s something we actively build, together.
Annex is a gathering space for people who believe live performance still matters, and that being together is a radical act.
Collective Care & Accountability
As a democratic collective, we believe how we work matters as much as what we make. We value collaboration, transparency, consent, and care. We listen when harm is named, learn when we fall short, and remain accountable to our community and each other.
Our Commitment
We commit to collectivism as both our structure and our stance. Annex Theatre is artist-run and self-governed, and that shared responsibility is central to how we practice inclusion—not as an abstract value, but as lived, ongoing action. We commit to queerness in all its forms, to racial justice, to trans and gender-expansive liberation, to disability access, and to standing with communities whose stories have been silenced, distorted, or pushed to the margins.
We commit to nurturing new voices while giving veteran artists space to take risks, succeed or fail boldly, and reinvent themselves. We believe fringe theatre is where experimentation thrives and where rules can be questioned, broken, or rewritten entirely.
Above all, we commit to the power of many voices moving together. When we operate as one collective, our stories become louder, stronger, and more honest than any one voice alone. Through collaboration and shared care, we tell powerful stories, wild stories, and necessary stories, because even on the fringe, especially on the fringe, our stories will be heard.