Thrown Stone Receives $5,000 Grant from the Burry Fredrik Foundation

Thrown Stone Theatre Company is delighted to announce a surprise grant of $5,000 received this week from The Burry Fredrik Foundation.

For the past five years, the Burry Fredrik Foundation has supported Connecticut’s “Flagship” Producing Theaters: Goodspeed Musicals, Hartford Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Westport Country Playhouse, and Yale Repertory Theatre. And, with the help of the Yale School of Drama, it created the Burry Fredrik Foundation Design Fellowship to help support early career designs and their work in the state of Connecticut.

This year the Foundation has chosen to expand its support and include more of Connecticut’s exciting and adventurous professional producing theaters. This grant will provide production support to Thrown Stone’s 2020 season, featuring the National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere of Annie Jump and the Library of Heaven by Reina Hardy, and the U.S. Premiere of the 2019 Olivier Award-nominated The Phlebotomist by Ella Road, both opening in July.

“It is an incredible honor to be recognized by the Burry Fredrik Foundation,” said Co-Artistic Director Jonathan Winn. “To be a part of the legacy of this groundbreaking artist is a dream come true.”

“We thank trustees Joy Flink, Barbara Pearce, and Michael Ross,” added Co-Artistic Director Jason Peck. “Their vision, enthusiasm, and advocacy are an inspiration.”

ABOUT BURRY FREDRIK

Burry Fredrik was a trailblazing Broadway producer, director, and stage manager with a career spanning over five decades. Her Broadway debut was stage managing The Relapse in 1950, and went on on to PSM such notable productions as the world premieres of Inherit the Wind, Jerry Herman’s first book musical Milk and Honey, and two collaborations between playwright William Inge and director Elia Kazan, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and Loss of Roses, the latter starring a young Warren Beatty. Ms. Fredrik received her first Tony nomination for co-producing the revival of G.B. Shaw’s Too True to be Good, starring Lillian Gish, Eileen Heckart, Cyril Ritchard, and Glynis Johns. Other landmark productions include the 1975 revival of The Royal Family, An Almost Perfect Person, and To Grandmother’s House We Go, which starred Kim Hunter and Eva Le Gallienne. Off-Broadway her productions included Exiles, Catholic School Girls, (which she also directed), and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She won a Tony Award for co-producing Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. As a director, Ms. Fredrik made her Broadway debut with the short-lived musical Wild and Wonderful. She would go on to garner praise as a director in prominent regional and “strawhat circuit” productions, with such shows as Talley’s Folly, To Grandmother’s House We Go, Mornings at Seven, Night Mother, and Speed the Plow, all of which were performed at the Westport Country Playhouse, among other theatres.

She would continue her professional career well into the 2000s, directing noted productions of new plays at the Lucille Lortel White Barn Theatre in Westport, CT. She served on the board of both the Westport Country Playhouse and Long Wharf Theatre. She established the Burry Fredrik Foundation, Inc., a charitable corporation, with a mission to aid in the growth and health of theatre companies, primarily in Fairfield County. Funding will support the development of new works, particularly young theatre companies.

ABOUT THROWN STONE THEATRE COMPANY

Thrown Stone’s mission is “to engage our region with new and reimagined theatre in intimate settings, creating a body of work that moves, connects, and challenges all who join the conversation.”