“The Pearl,” Charleston Stage’s new education center and rehearsal space opens in Ashley Landing shopping center this month
by Bill Davis | News Editor
Starting this month, Charleston Stage will open its new education center and rehearsal space in the Ashley Landing shopping center in a former pharmacy. Later a performance space will be opened next door, thanks in part to a large donation from a longtime West Ashley family.
Forty years ago, playwright Julian Wiles founded what has become the state’s largest professional theater company in the historic Dock Street Theatre. Since then, it has mounted more than 150 productions downtown in front of collectively more than a million audience members.
Wiles insists that Charleston Stage has no intention of leaving the Dock Street, and that this just represents a further expansion into West Ashley.
For the past 14 years, Charleston Stage had been utilizing a storefront in a retail strip in Mount Pleasant for rehearsals, youth education classes, and its administrative offices. It was a rental, so last year when the landlord announced they were selling the building, the venerable theater knew it had to come up with a plan.
“We always had a plan to get a new space, that just jumped up the date; we just didn’t get to pick the timeline,” says Marybeth Clark, the theater company’s associate artistic director and its director for education.
This was not Charleston Stage’s first foray into West Ashley, as it already has costume and building shops around the corner in another retail strip on Sam Rittenberg Boulevard.
“We’ve decided to start with our education programming here at the West Ashley Theater Center first,” says Clark. The education center will welcome upwards of 200 students every month, with more coming in the summer for theater camps.
Currently, Charleston Stage’s education offerings begin with classes for kindergarten students on up through musical and acting training for eighth graders, as well as an audition-only performance troupe for more serious thespians.
Additionally, it will now offer improv-based classes in conjunction with Theater 99 instructors.
Greg Tavares, co-artistic director of downtown’s Theater 99 and director of its education, says he could have hosted the improv programs at their theater on Meeting Street, but praises Charleston Stage’s “super dedication to education,” singling out its TheatreWings program.
When it comes to youth theater instruction “Charleston Stage is a known entity,” says Tavares. “You have to have so much confidence in the provider for time with your children,” which Charleston Stage provides, he says.
Clark and Wiles say that a performing space will be available to other arts programmers to rent out come January.
Dubbed “The Peal,” in honor of the especially generous gift the Pearlstine family of West Ashley gave toward the project, the performance space will feature a full stage, 132 seats, and complete with professional lights and sound.
The Pearlstine Family Foundation is seated at the Coastal Community foundation. Susan Pearlstine Norton says she was “born and raised in South Windermere, I went to St. Andrews Elementary and St. Andrews High School, both of my daughters live in South Windermere, as well as two aunts.”
“To put it bluntly, we are bullish on West Ashley,” says Pearlstine Norton.
Norton says she found herself taken aback about there not being much if any discussion of growing the arts in the ongoing West Ashley Revitalization Commission meetings she had been attending. That struck her as shortsighted.
So, when the opportunity to help Charleston Stage move more of its footprint into West Ashley, she and her sister and father ponied up $250,000.
“This is an opportunity to really invest here in West Ashley, and hopefully set the bar of how much to invest here in West Ashley,” she says. “Most of the dollars we’re asked to contribute come from downtown or East Cooper organizations.”
