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Philadelphia theater companies are still recovering from pandemic shutdowns five years ago. Some smaller performance companies are banding together to devise long-term collaborative relationships.

Starting July 1, Azuka Theatre and Simpatico Theatre will share the same artistic director, Allison Heishman. Currently the leader of Simpatico, Heishman will straddle both companies once Azuka’s artistic director, Rebecca May Flowers, steps down to start a children’s theater company.

Heishman said this is not a merger, but she will lead both companies into a single, collaborative 2025-2026 season.

“It’s what we need to do to not just survive but to thrive in this industry,” Heishman said. “There’s so much uncertainty. There’s so much question about how we support the art and the artists the way we should be. Collaboration is about working smart and bringing more people in.”

“The goal at the end of the day is to continue making great art that speaks to Philly,” she said.

‘A theater Voltron’

Azuka Theatre, with an annual budget of less than half a million dollars, is known for developing new plays with local playwrights. Simpatico, with an annual budget of about $100,000 or less, is known for staging socially and politically topical plays.

Heishman said they will each retain their own organizational identity as they seek ways to work in tandem.

“I’ve been thinking about it like a theater Voltron,” she said about the Japanese anime cartoon about five flying machines that interlock to form a single, giant robot.

“You bring different organizations, different artists, different producers, the next generation of folks, not to mix my ‘Star Trek’ with my ‘Transformers,’” Heishman said. “Thinking about how we can make this model something that could be evolving.”

Theater companies have long co-produced work together, a practice that has stepped up since COVID shutdowns sent everyone scrambling. For example, Theatre Exile in South Philly and Theatre in the X in West Philly have co-produced outdoor shows since 2021. Next week, the annual PlayPenn playwrights conference is partnering with seven Philadelphia theaters to stage readings of new scripts in development.

Azuka and Simpatico are somewhat different in that their partnership is closer and longer, planning a whole season together: In the fall they will co-produce the world premiere of “1 Pound 4 Ounces,” an autobiographical one-man show by Philadelphia performer Khalil Munir about being born premature and ultimately learning to excel at tap dancing.

That will be followed in the spring by the world premiere of “Class C” by Philadelphia playwright Chaz T. Martin, a thriller about a Homeland Security agent who goes off the grid.

Proof of concept in the boys’ bathroom

Azuka and Simpatico are following in the footsteps of two other local companies that came together last year. Inis Nua Theatre, which specializes in plays of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and Tiny Dynamite, which experiments with modes of audience participation and immersion, both came under the artistic direction of KC MacMillan.

Inis Nua and Tiny Dynamite received a $186,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage last fall to support the discovery of a sustainable collaborative model. Since then, MacMillan has been looking for ways the two disparate companies overlap.

“There’s a lot of administrative load that even Philly’s smallest arts organizations bear in order to be compliant as a nonprofit. Do we all need to be doing all of that?” MacMillan said. “We have data now that will help us tease out what’s really possible.”

The proof of their compatibility came this month when both Inis Nua and Tiny Dynamite produced “Square Go,” a comedy set in the boys’ bathroom of a Scottish boarding school. It was performed in a makeshift bar built inside the Drake theater, where patrons could have a drink and snacks during the performance.

MacMillan said the Scottish play performed in a fast-casual fashion ticked all the boxes for an Inis Nua/Tiny Dynamite collaboration.

“We extended our capacity for this show on the belief of: We don’t think we have much overlap in our audience based on the data we’ve run, so let’s see if this show can double our audience,” she said. “In fact, it did. It is one of the highest-selling shows in Inis Nua history.”

MacMillan believes that if smaller theater companies can find ways to collaborate without losing their artistic missions, it could lead to better jobs. Many people who work in local theater juggle multiple part-time jobs across several small companies to make ends meet; a single full-time position that allows them to work in many small companies would make life easier for all involved.