​Created by Iris Sowlat and Allison Fradkin in 2019, Violet Surprise Theatre is a queer DIY theatre company with the mission to produce new works that vibrantly and valiantly validate the identities and experiences of queer women, with fierce allyship to the non-binary community.

Violet Surprise debuted in August 2019 with Violet Surprise: Fem-slash Fest (co-produced with Otherworld Theatre), a festival of short plays that queered the cannon, profiled in this Chicago Tribune article.. In February of 2020, they mounted Lez Beaus, a festival of new work about queer love. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, they hosted the monthly Zoom variety show SapphFest​. For nine months in 2021, Iris Sowlat helmed the development of Violet Surprise's first full-length ensemble-devised play, ​The Icon Project., a historical fantasy about iconic queer women from history.

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Upcoming: The Icon Project

From January to August of 2021, Iris Sowlat led the creation of the new play The Icon Project, ​collaboratively devised/written by Sowlat and an ensemble of seven other actors/writers/devisors. This play is still in development and may receive a workshop production soon. 

Thrown into Sappho's magical house for a week before a "Hall of Fame" ceremony, seven vastly different queer women from history debate their drastically different beliefs, re-write their narratives, explore their pasts, make art, and maybe throw a party.

Part time-hopping period fantasy, part interactive cabaret, and all queer - this is The Icon Project.

SapphFest
SapphFest is Violet Surprise Theatre's quarterly virtual variety show over Zoom featuring solo performances by queer women and non-binary performance artists and short plays. SapphFest often includes a potpourri of stand-up comedy, personal storytelling, original music, dance, clown, short experimental film, and other performance art. SapphFest had seven installments during the COVID-19 pandemic, from May 2020 to June 2021. 

Lez Beaus
Violet Surprise's Valentine's Day festival Lez Beaus explored lesbian love through the ages and throughout all of its different iterations - from meet-cute's to breakups and everything in between. Lez Beaus included 11 short plays from playwrights based across the United States and was performed at The Martin in Chicago. 

Fem-slash Fest
Your favorite fandoms with a Sapphic twist!  The 13 short plays in Violet Surprise's first festival lovingly parody beloved fandoms and re-imagines queer narratives and relationships for female characters who weren’t queer in the original source material. Violet Surprise: FemSlash Fest was co-produced with Otherworld Theatre, and featured queer parodies of I Love Lucy, Anne of Green Gables, Wicked, Harry Potter, The Avengers, Shakespeare plays, and more. 

In curating the festival, I asked myself, "For centuries, queer people have always had to ask What if?- in both popular culture and in life. Until recently, queer creators needed to keep queer themes subtle or coded, and there wasn’t much representation of queer relationships in pop culture at all. We never had a gay equivalent of I Love Lucy. Fan-fiction is a way of taking ownership of the creative narratives present in our mainstream and re-imagining that What If.”