The Eno River Players were founded in the winter of 2015 in Durham, North Carolina. The founding artistic director was me, Leo Egger. I was fourteen. The first round of funding was my Bar Mitzvah money. We held open auditions and cobbled together a cast from the community––academics, piano teachers, lawyers, students. Our first production was Hamlet, staged at the Mosaic Church of Durham on a tiny stage below a red cross. The mission of the company was to bring challenging but accessible productions of Shakespeare to an area bereft of classical theater and to provide a much-needed artistic home for local theater-makers––on an extremely limited budget. The shows had to be financially and stylistically accessible enough to fill seats. At the same time, I wanted them to be professional, inventive, real––the kind of shows that would resonate with the audience of my hometown.