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The Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival and Interference Series have banded together and found a new home in downtown Flagstaff.

Located in the old Beaver Street Brewery Banquet Room next to Burly Fish Tattoo, the Beaver Street Theatre is the first permanent, physical venue for the two nonprofits and is slated to celebrate its grand opening on April 23—the Bard’s birthday.

“I feel really excited. I feel really hopeful,� said FlagShakes founder and executive director Dawn Tucker. “There's just so much work still to be done.�

For 10 years, both FlagShakes and Interference Series have been dedicated to providing audiences with incredible performance art experiences from “Julius Caesar� to “Mr. Ho's Orchestrotica,� but despite their success, neither had a venue that they could truly call home.

Over the years, Tucker explained, their troupe has performed all over town, starting, in the early days, at Heritage Square, then circulating between Coconino Center for the Arts, the Orpheum Theater, Prochnow Auditorium and even Riordan Mansion, and while these venues have been wonderful and accommodating, she says that it’s hard not having a dedicated space to rehearse.

“With theater, we need four weeks of rehearsal, and we need at least a week of that to be in the space where we're going to perform,� Tucker said. “We pay all of our actors, all our artists and directors� so just having a spot where they'll have, like, a cozy couch and a Keurig and be able to know where the water fountain is or leave their rehearsal shoes overnight. [It] feels like the next level of professionalism for us.�

Conversely, Interference Series required a much more turnkey solution that allowed them to pop in and set up for a quick show or experimental jam session.

Part of the Series� ultimate aim is to present as many shows as it can to demystify underappreciated forms of art, but without a physical location, its co-founders Owen Davis and Rob Wallace have struggled to reach the heights that they know are possible.

“We believe having a consistent physical space will support our broader mission of providing a venue for our community to engage with experimental and improvised forms of performance,� Davis said in an interview with the Arizona Daily Sun.

Tucker worked with Davis for the first time during the pandemic while producing a documentary piece about “Cattle Tank,� a  with local artist Shawn Skabelund.

“I'm a Shakespeare gal,� Tucker said. “I'm a classic theater lady. I am not an experimental music or experimental art person, but their end piece was so profound and made me feel so many things that I was like, ‘Wow, I have got to work with both of them again.’�

Eventually, when she and the team at FlagShakes began talking more seriously about securing their own space, friends and faithful audience members kept bringing up the Interference Series as potential partners.

Davis believes that this is because of their presence in the community over the course of the last decade, their friends, family and creative collaborators recognizing their desire and efforts to grow, and by chance, Interference Series became involved in the conversation at the exact moment that FlagShakes identified the right place.

“Like so many wonderful things in life, this opportunity seemed to develop at the right place and the right time,� Davis said.

But the effort to find a stable home was not simple for either organization.

Interference Series had been looking for their own location for about a year, and before finding the space on Beaver Street, FlagShakes had been hitting dead ends at every turn.

Hannah Johnson, the Festival’s marketing director, said, “We were really interested in this other space on the east side, and it ended up falling through. And, you know, we were not banking on that space, but obviously starting to dream up how that space might work.�

That roadblock prompted the FlagShakes team to explore alternative paths forward, so Tucker looked to the community for answers.

She called Chris Scully, the co-owner of the Orpheum, and he ended up pointing her in the direction of Maury Herman and Karen Kinne-Herman who, aside from owning a lot of commercial real estate in downtown Flagstaff, are also active patrons of the arts. That connection directed Tucker to 1,900 square feet of space being used, for the most part, as storage for the neighboring Beaver Street Brewery.

Tucker said it felt like kismet, and with the help of Kelly and Winnie Hanseth, the owners of the brewery, Mike Darby, the operations manager, and Midge Fleishman, with Coast & Mountain Properties, FlagShakes and the Interference Series were able to secure and co-lease the space.

“We never could have done it except for the relationships that we spent the last, I grew up here, so the last 40 years building and the last 10 years that FlagShakes has spent building. These relationships are really what made it happen.�

With their location secured, they were immediately presented with the question of whether or not this space could be turned into a theater.

Nothing had been done with the banquet room for around 20 years, but Johnson says that the building is structurally sound and that the majority of their work is going to be cosmetic.

“We're not rebuilding anything, but we are literally redoing everything,� she said. “Floors are being redone. Everything was repainted� We're using spackle to, basically, redo sections of the drywall. So things like that, which I'm grateful for because I don't know how to rebuild walls or things like that.�

But even when the team doesn’t know how to fix something, Flagstaff answers with volunteers who do.

“It's been amazing who has shown up to get their hands dirty and do work with us and just miraculously knows how to do something we don't know how to do,� Tucker said. “With someone right now, they’re doing built in storage for the closets for us, and we had a guy who came in and was able to replace both of those ceiling fixtures, which I never would have been able to do.�

There is still a lot of work to be done, but despite this, both FlagShakes and the Interference Series have gotten some use out of the space.

Davis and Wallace have screened an experimental film and hosted a fundraiser for local poet and writer Katie King, and Tucker, Johnson and their team have staged a Phoenix-based production of “The Tragedy of Coriolanus.�

Additionally, the Flagstaff Mountain Film Festival and the Northern Arizona Book Festival have already booked the venue for dates in April.

While primarily an extension of the Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival and Interference Series� efforts to grow and become more sustainable, Beaver Street Theatre has already become a sanctuary for arts and culture in Flagstaff.

“One lesson that I am so thankful for is that creatives and arts organizations in this town seem to know inherently that making and presenting art is so difficult already that it's so much better to collaborate and lift each other up,� Davis said. “As a volunteer-run organization, meaning nobody on our staff is paid including Rob and myself, we are well aware of the power of giving and what can happen when we help each other out.�

With more than $20,000 put into the venue already, Johnson adds, the nonprofits need all the help they can get whether it be attending shows, joining the FlagShakes Fellowship or simply donating, every dollar is a dollar toward bolstering the creative infrastructure that makes this town special.

“I feel, of course, grateful for everyone who has donated and who has helped because, again, we can't do this alone,� she said. “We are just [five] people living our lives trying to make this theater happen.�

If you would like to learn more about this bold journey and how you can support it, visit both of the organization’s websites at and or follow them on Instagram for more up-to-date information from parking maps to new programming.

“One of the things I've learned in 40 years of doing arts, but also now in having children, is that the hardest things we do in our life are the things that are the most worth doing, and that's how this feels,� Tucker said. “It's like this is one of the hardest things I've ever done, but I know it's worth doing because it's going to be such a beautiful piece of the arts community here.�

In the words of Shakespeare himself, “All the world’s a stage,� and for Flagstaff, a bright new act has just begun.