​Created by Iris Sowlat and Allison Fradkin in 2019, Violet Surprise Theatre is a queer DIY theatre company with the mission to produce theatre that represents women, especially highlighting queer women. 

Violet Surprise debuted in August 2019 with Violet Surprise: Fem-slash Fest, a festival of short plays that queered the cannon, profiled in this Chicago Tribune article..

Their latest show is Lauren Gunderson's The Revolutionists!  

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The Revolutionists by Lauren Gunderson
What if four very different women with different approaches to revolution found themselves together in 1793? The Revolutionists is a startlingly relevant play about four historical women who lived boldly in France during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Both hilarious and brutal, this witty period dramedy is especially relatable in today’s political climate. This grand comedy is about violence, legacy, art, activism, feminism, chosen sisters, and how we actually change the world. 
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Dates and Venues: This play is touring to over 20 venues in Chicago and the suburbs, reaching as far north as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Check out this Google doc for the full list of dates, venues, and ticket links:

Revolutionists Tour Dates

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.

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.”