The Miscreant Book Club began the way many good theatre ideas do: out of necessity and a stubborn refusal to stop making art.

 

When the world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we created the Book Club as a way to keep our community of actors, artists, and theatre lovers connected. Even when stages went dark, we could still gather online, crack open a script, and do the thing we love most—bring stories to life together. The readings continued across time zones and continents, even while company members Andy and Erin were living in China, proving that theatre doesn’t require a stage so much as it requires people willing to imagine one.

 

Today, the Miscreant Book Club has grown into a regular in-person gathering and a cornerstone of our community. Since 2025 we’ve been meeting face-to-face, and in 2026 we found our new home at Fiction Beer Company, where good beer and good scripts make excellent company.

 

At each gathering we read a play aloud together—sometimes a classic, sometimes a seminal work of modern theatre, and sometimes a brand-new script hot off the presses. Anyone can join us. Actors get to stretch their muscles with a cold reading, theatre lovers get to experience plays the way they were meant to be heard, and everyone gets a front-row seat to the strange magic that happens when a group of people build a world out of nothing but words.

 

Whenever time allows, the reading is followed by a conversation about the play: what worked, what surprised us, what confused us, and what the playwright might be trying to say. Those lively post-reading discussions eventually inspired our podcast, Minutes to Curtain, where we keep the conversation going.

 

The Miscreant Book Club is informal, welcoming, and a little bit chaotic—in the best possible way. It’s a place to encounter new plays, rediscover old ones, meet fellow theatre nerds, and remember that theatre begins long before the lights come up on opening night.

Pull up a chair, grab a script, and join the mischief.