Olympia Family Theater co-founder steps down to help find leadership for the future
Olympia Family Theater artistic director Jen Ryle is stepping down from the role she’s held since 2006, when she and Samantha Chandler started the children’s theater company with $1,000 and the help of a few family members and friends.
“I’m proud of how far we’ve come from the beginning,” Ryle said. “I think about the very first show in The Midnight Sun. Samantha and I and my family and our friends all pitched in together. Then we watched as people came to us who could do things we could incorporate into bigger and better shows and a bigger and better organization.
“We started with nothing and we created something.”
Now, it’s time for Ryle and Chandler, who stepped down as managing director in 2014 but is now chair of the theater’s board of directors, to re-create what they built together.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” Ryle told The Olympian. “One of the last times I sat down to choose the season, I was thinking, ‘What are the stories we aren’t telling? What are the things that are missing?’
“I thought, ‘If we had someone with fresh eyes, I’ll bet we could do so much more,’ ” she added. “ ‘It would be amazing to see this thing that I and a whole bunch of other people have created go on into the future.’ ”
Ryle is leading the theater’s search for her successor and hopes to fill the position in September with the goal of launching a mini-season in December.
The theater has long prioritized diversity and inclusion, and those values are front and center in the hiring process.
“Opportunities in theater and other creative industries have historically excluded and continue to disproportionately exclude Black and indigenous people, people of color, people from working-class backgrounds, people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ people,” the job posting reads. “We strongly encourage individuals with these identities to apply.”
“I have great hope that we will be able to find exactly the right person and keep the dream alive,” Ryle said, adding that she plans to work with the new hire for a smooth transition and to continue to volunteer, perhaps direct and definitely be in the audience beyond that.
Though she’d been planning for a while to step down, Ryle hung on through the pandemic, doing her part to leave the company well-positioned to launch into its first season since COVID-19 closed theaters around the world.
“We’re in really great shape because of the support of the community and the grants that have come in, the Cares Act money and the Shuttered Venues Operators Grant,” she said. “We’re ready to reopen now.”
Surviving 18 months without a production is just the latest on a long list of accomplishments for Ryle and for the theater, which received a 2018 Achievement in the Arts award from The Washington Center for the Performing Arts.
“Jen deserves a standing ovation for her commitment to reaching young audiences with engaging theater experiences,” said Jill Barnes, the center’s executive director. “Together, Jen and Samantha created a unique model for offering community performers an opportunity to grow and shine and for families with youngsters to have an affordable, first-class, and up-close performance opportunity. They truly created magic with each event.”
In 2019, Masterworks Choral Ensemble honored Ryle in its yearly Salute to the Arts.
Behind the awards were 14 seasons of mainstage shows, including seven locally written originals, plus daytime shows for the youngest theatergoers, traveling productions and educational programs.
“Jen’s artistic vision has always been one of the guiding forces of the theater,” Chandler told The Olympian. “She’s good at building community, and she has that artistic eye in terms of what something can look like, how you can make it happen on a small budget, how you can get creative with costuming, casting and props, all of those important pieces.”
Not only Ryle herself but her family — her husband, Ted, and her children Alexa, Mandy and Lu — have been involved with the theater since its beginnings. Both Alexa and Mandy teach in the education programs, and Ted has not only acted and directed but also written the musical “Cinder Edna,” which the theater produced in 2013 and 2018.
One of the company’s biggest accomplishments was the move from renting space for shows — first at the now-closed Midnight Sun performance space and then at the Washington Center — to the 2014 opening of its own 100-seat black box theater at 612 Fourth Ave. E. in Olympia, which had been the home of Capital Playhouse. When the playhouse closed in 2013, many arts groups were interested in moving into the space, but it was Olympia Family Theater that made it happen.
Ryle isn’t sure what’s next for her professionally, but she is eager to see the next production at Olympia Family Theater.
“What I long for is that feeling of being in the room together and the lights dim and you lean forward and you’re in the room experiencing it together,” she said.
This story was originally published August 19, 2021 at 5:00 AM.