Managing director Lee Foster is leaving Theatrical Outfit after helping longtime artistic director Tom Key lead the downtown company for three years.Foster’s official last day is Oct. 31, but she will continue to consult until May 2018, reporting to the board of directors on an audience-building roundtable funded by the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. During her tenure, the Outfit has grown its revenue, ticket sales and number of productions per season.
A statement from the company said the search for a new marketing director — the business leader of a theater — “will likely” begin in January. Foster, 60, joined Theatrical Outfit in July 2014 after 16 years at Hillbarn Theatre in Foster City, Calif., the sixth-oldest continuously operating amateur theater company in the nation.
The 41-year-old Outfit, which endeavors to tell “stories that stir the soul,” is the second-oldest professional theater company in Atlanta; the Alliance Theatre is eight years older. The company generally performs in the 199-seat Balzer Theater at Herren’s on Luckie Street NW. The venue is named for benefactors Bill and Peg Balzer and the civil-rights-era restaurant that once stood on the site.
For larger shows, the Outfit uses Georgia State University’s Rialto Center for the Arts around the corner on Forsyth Street. The company’s 2017/18 season begins Sept. 7 at the Rialto with the intown leg of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, its musical collaboration with Lawrenceville’s Aurora Theatre.
