We were lucky to catch up with Ariel Fristoe recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ariel, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

When my friends and I started Out of Hand Theater in 2001, we realized there were plenty of theater companies in Atlanta doing good work, and we would never be able to compete with the star power or budget size of the Alliance or Broadway at the Fox, never mind film and television, so we shouldn’t even try. Instead, we would create experiences you could not have at home, not just the feeling of being in the presence of live art, but we would give the audience an active role to play in every event. We would make work about the things that matter most to us and our community, and partner with subject matter experts on the development and production of that work. We would bring theater into spaces where people were already gathered, and where they feel comfortable, and we would combine theater with other social interactions, including meals, parties, and conversations.

We experimented wildly, with theater events in the form of a self-help seminar, a wedding, a pop concert, a flash mob, and a doctor’s office waiting room that transformed into a magical Pharmaland. We designed interactive games that took players across neighborhoods, parks, university campuses, and sometimes, whole cities. We produced events in office buildings, at festivals, and inside cars. We collaborated with scientists and health care workers, and invited audiences to take part in a myriad of activities. In the end, we landed on the model that Out of Hand has today. A model that allowed us, a tiny company in Georgia, to triple our annual budget and get onto The New York Times Best Theater of the year list during the pandemic, through community collaborations for racial justice.

Ariel, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Ariel Fristoe, Artistic Director and founder of Out of Hand Theater, winner of The New York Times Best Theater of 2020, and the Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities 2021. Out of Hand works at the intersection of art, social justice, and civic engagement. We use the tools of theater to help create a more just world through programs that combine theater and film with information and conversation.

Since 2001, Out of Hand has collaborated with dozens of community partners to produce programs that combine art to open hearts, information to open minds, and conversation to process emotions and information and make a plan for action. All of our programs are partnerships with community organizations, government agencies, businesses, other nonprofits, and/or schools. Our programs are based on our two pillars, racial justice and economic justice, and our they take place in homes, schools, businesses, houses of worship, community centers, public spaces and on Zoom.

We produce Shows in Homes on social justice topics, one-act plays paired with cocktail parties and conversations with community partners. We are typically in 30 to 50 livings rooms across Metro Atlanta each year. Our last show before the shutdown, Conceal and Carry, tackled gun violence in America with Moms Demand Action. This spring, we produced Calf, a play we commissioned about mass incarceration and obstacles people face after prison, with Georgia Justice Project, and this March, we are producing Shirley Chisolm: Unbossed and Unbowed with Partnership for Southern Equity.

We produce Community Collaborations, like StopHIVStigma interactive theater workshop with the CDC and Positive Impact Health Centers, and See You, a child sex trafficking awareness and prevention program for middle school students with the three state agencies and two nonprofits that work to prevent trafficking and rehabilitate survivors. We piloted See You in five Georgia middle schools last spring, in preparation for the rollout next school year. This year, we are producing Time Has Chosen Us with the Georgia Department Public Health, a vaccine confidence program we produced in collaboration with the CDC.

Our Education programs include Creative Kids and the Institute for Equity Activism. Through Creative Kids, we help close the opportunity gap for Metro Atlanta students of color and students from low-income families by providing free in school and after school arts education at high public poverty schools and after-school centers. Creative Kids has served 600 students at 12 schools with 312 classes since 2015, all free to students and schools. Through the Institute for Equity Activism, we build the capacity of individuals and organizations in activism through arts and transformational leadership, centered with a racial equity lens.

Through Equitable Dinners, we gather strangers, both in-person and online, for vital conversation about race and racism, launched by theater. Just this past fall, Out of Hand Theater and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights gathered 5000 guests at 500 tables across Metro Atlanta, in homes, community centers, and houses of worship, for facilitated conversations about racial equity over potluck dinners, with diverse strangers at every table. Every dinner was launched by a short play about being Black in Atlanta, performed live in every room, and a reading of the events of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Equitable Dinners’ many partners also include the Mayor’s Office, The King Center, Partnership for Southern Equity, and Atlanta Public Schools.

Over 10,000 people have already taken part in our Dinners, with 58% white attendees and 42% attendees of color, an almost unheard-of mix in public conversations about race. The Coca-Cola Foundation, The Arthur Blank Family Foundation, and Silicon Valley Community Foundation have provided major funding, and we have been featured in dozens of newspapers, TV and radio news, and other publications, and appeared in The New York Times four times in 2020.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

In 2018, I attended a facilitated conversation about racial equity over dinner, organized by One Small Change. I loved it, and I wondered if the conversation could go even further if it was launched by theater: something to engage participants’ emotions and give them a common experience to talk about. I reached out to the organizers, Dr. Dietra Hawkins and Adria Kitchens, who is now my partner, and invited them to attend our Shows in Homes. They loved the idea, and in 2019, we partnered with One Small Change, City of Decatur’s Better Together Advisory Board, City Schools of Decatur and Decatur Housing Authority to organize Decatur Dinners, 100 dinners for 1000 guests on one night, in homes, community centers, and houses of worship, with a facilitated conversation about racial equity over a potluck dinner with racially diverse strangers at every table, sparked by the live performance of a short play about being Black in America, in every room. The program was wildly successful. Some 1400 people signed up, and we made space for 1200 at 120 tables that night, with 120 facilitators and 80 actors, all performing the same words at the same time, all around Decatur. The story was reported by a dozen media outlets, including All Things Considered, and suddenly, people were contacting us from around Metro Atlanta and around the country, asking when the next one was, and how they could bring this to their communities.

We re-branded the program as Equitable Dinners: Setting the Table for Racial Equity, and our next plan was to organize Equitable Dinners Atlanta. Then Covid hit, and One Small Change folded. But by then, we had assembled a powerful team of partners, and with their help, we quickly changed plans. We brought my partner, Adria Kitchens, on as Out of Hand’s Director of Equity and Activism. Then in April 2020, just weeks after the shutdown, we launched Equitable Dinners: Lift Every Voice, a free, monthly, online series addressing a different anti-racism topic each month, with a guest speaker, the performance of a new 10-minute play written in consultation with the speaker, and facilitated, small-group conversations in Zoom breakout rooms. Equitable Dinners has addressed anti-racism and health, education, housing, food, poverty, criminal justice, voting rights, and immigration, with many more to come.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Equitable Dinners gave birth to Equitable Dinners at Work: private, paid programs for businesses and schools including Coca-Cola, Google, BlackRock, Audible, UPS, EY, Bain, Veritiv, Mercedes-Benz, Seyfarth Shaw, Georgia Power, The Arbor Company, YMCA of Metro Atlanta, and Emory, providing a transformative new revenue stream to fund our free programs, like Equitable Dinners and Creative Kids. This happened almost by accident: as I contacted business and schools to invite them to our free, public event, they started coming back asking to hire us to provide programs for their communities during the workday. We often joke that ff we had known how popular this would be, we would have reconsidered the name Dinners, since these private programs are almost always Equitable Breakfasts, Lunches, or Coffees!

Real progress in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion can be hard to achieve, and we are so grateful to be able to provide a different way into the conversation. As a recent study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology confirms, theater improves empathy and changes attitudes. Art engages emotions, making the message sticky and memorable. By pairing art with information and conversation, Out of Hand inspires understanding, empathy, and action around social justice, and we help create a culture shift towards racial and economic justice. After Equitable Dinners, 96.7% of survey respondents feel moved, and 98.4% feel inspired to make a change. Last but not least, we know many companies and workers are struggling with creating a sense of belonging, especially after the isolation of the pandemic. We are glad to be able to help: Out of Hand’s programs also increase feelings of connectedness and social cohesion through positive, meaningful, personal interaction with strangers around the subjects that matter most, launched by theater.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.outofhandtheater.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outofhandatl/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/outofhandATL
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/out-of-hand-theater
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OutofHandATL
• Other: www.equitabledinners.com

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