​Created by Iris Sowlat and Allison Fradkin in 2019, Violet Surprise Theatre is a new DIY queer feminist 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 host the monthly Zoom variety show SapphFest​. And now, they about to launch their first full production and first devised play, ​The Icon Project.  

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Upcoming: The Icon Project

Thrown into an afterlife resembling a feminist bookstore in 2020 Chicago, 5-7 vastly different queer women from history debate their drastically different beleifs, re-write their narratives, make art, and maybe throw a party. Part time-hopping period fantasy, part interactive cabaret, and all queer - this is The Icon Project.

The Icon Project is a devised play where the plot and dialogue will be created collaboratively by the cast and director Iris Sowlat​

Auditions are in December of 2020 with a devising process in the winter and spring of 2021 and a production in mid-2021. 

SapphFest
SapphFest is Violet Surprise Theatre's monthly 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. 

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.”