Theatrikos Theatre Company (Theatrikos Theatre Company)

On Friday, April 12, 2019, a city sewer line, clogged with debris, diverted 4,000 gallons of raw sewage into the basement of the Doris Harper-White Community Playhouse, home of Theatrikos Theatre Company, in the heart of Flagstaff’s historic downtown.

Theatrikos stores its costumes, furniture, and props in the basement and houses its set-building shop, dressing rooms, and green room there as well. The resulting building closure forced the theatre to cancel the final weekend of its current show and find an alternative performance space for TheatriKids, its youth education program, to perform its upcoming production of "Newsies".


Men's dressing room


“The financial hit to our theatre can’t be overstated,” said Executive Director Chris Verrill. “We’ve spent years and thousands of hours of painstaking volunteer talent finding and tailoring thousands of costumes and buying all our set-building materials, furniture, and props. We don’t yet know what can be salvaged, but everything will have to be professionally cleaned, floors and walls have to be ripped out and replaced, and of course so many things will have to be thrown away. But as they say, ‘The show must go on!’”



Outside the shop looking toward the green room



“We theatre people are a hardy bunch and we’ll clean up and move on,” said Verrill. “Since the building’s downstairs must be gutted and we’ve lost almost all our set pieces and many of our costumes, we figure now is the time to reconstruct with a mind toward rebuilding and redesigning to make the best use possible of the space.

The City of Flagstaff has been wonderful to work with and are taking steps to determine insurance compensation to fix what was destroyed, and we’re asking the community to help us gather the resources to create a small additional black box performance studio which can double as a rehearsal space.  Thus allowing more artists in the city to have a place to perform.  Plus we’ll rebuild our dressing rooms to provide flexible classroom space for our TheatriKids education program. Our community, and certainly our theatre, will benefit from additional rehearsal and performance space and with a better design, we can offer even more to the community.”

The city and insurance will get us back to where we were; you can help us get to where we're going!


The hallway leading to the dressing rooms


“We sure could use the public’s help,” continued Verrill. “We’ve established this GoFundMe fundraiser to help us defray some of the costs that are coming our way. We’re mustering our considerable volunteer resources and inviting the entire community to jump in. We’re estimating that, while the cost of materials and labor for the design improvement are substantial, about $75,000, this is a chance to turn lemons into lemonade.  Rather than rebuild exactly as it was with an outdated design, our sewage mess has provided us with an opportunity to make some improvements.  And now is the time to do it.”


Entering the costume storage


The theater has $12,000 pledged toward the $75,000 goal and has raised a little over $2,000 through Facebook.

Just $61,000 to go! With how quickly the community has jumped at the chance to pitch in, we feel confident we’ll raise it all and will soon be able to be provide even more space not only for our programs, but also for the organizations that borrow costumes and props and rent space from us.

The building is closed while it is cleaned and the basement cleared out


For nearly 50 years, Theatrikos Theatre Company , an award-winning non-profit theatre, has grown into a leading community arts organization. Located in the Doris Harper-White Community Playhouse in historic downtown Flagstaff, the theatre proudly offers nearly 70 performances of classic and new plays, musicals, and youth productions.



The green room

Outside the shop door

Our set building materials and tools sit in sewage


Demolition and sanitation