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 platform below a red cross. 

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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.

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These constraints, far from restricting us, came to define our approach to theater. Our tickets were affordable, our shows funded almost entirely through donations. Not expecting significant ticket revenue, we minimized costs. Our shows, by necessity, were intimate, imaginative, and relatively short. But cheap tickets and short run times attracted audiences and freed us to take the artistic risks that made our shows feel fresh and exciting. We learned to make theater that could only be theater. This same ethos now guides our work in Brooklyn. ​

 

Following Hamlet, we mounted productions of King Lear, Othello, Waiting for Godot, and As You Like It. We also workshopped In the Shade, an original musical about the poet Robert Lowell. After the pandemic, we began developing our own adaptations of classics and moving beyond North Carolina. The first of these works was Phaedo, based on Plato's dialogues which premiered at the Camden Fringe Festival in London. The next year we staged a well-reviewed adaptation of Bulgakov’s take on Gogol's Dead Souls, which toured in New York City and London, in addition to performances in Durham and New Haven. 

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In our 2024-2025 season of Virtue & Vice, we staged three productions in Brooklyn—The Anatomy of Melancholy, Cried the Phoenix, and Measure for Measure—each attracting large audiences of young people and helping us grow our community. Our current season is devoted to the theme of Prophecy and Apocalypse. All three shows are about taking God’s presence on earth seriously. Learn more here. We hope to see you soon!