The Weekend Theater is a non-profit theatrical community that produces socially significant plays and musicals for central Arkansas.

Founded in 1991, our intimate, smoke-free theater is located in a remodeled two-story building at the corner of 7th and Chester streets in Little Rock. For theater-lovers, the setting is decidedly New York in character — apartments upstairs, theater downstairs, vintage clothing and novelty shop next door, pizza joint and microbrewery across one street, and the local fire station across the other!

Although we are called The Weekend Theater because we are volunteers who work at day-time jobs and perform only on the weekends, a more descriptive name might be community playhouse. We attempt to be a true community of people dedicated to the teaching, learning and practice of kindness, respect and honor. In short, we hope to practice “community,” the coming together into a oneness.

Unlike other theaters, while our performance and product are important, they remain secondary. Primary for us is how we treat each other and how, through our plays and musicals, we teach ourselves how to care about others. We attempt to accomplish this goal by personally, interpersonally, and educationally reducing prejudice, cruelty and indifference, which are so often created by emphasizing human differences, including gender, race, age, religion, sexual orientation, disability, health status, etc. To accomplish this, we choose plays of social significance, with themes in which people learn through such things as suffering, cruelty, and insensitivity. In order to “practice what we preach,” we volunteers of The Weekend Theater agree to interact with as much thoughtfulness and awareness of our actions and the effects those actions might have on ourselves and each other as we are capable of at the present time. We attempt to grow more compassionate with each interaction. In these ways we hope to increase understanding which leads to kindness and to decrease miscommunication that leads to so much suffering.