The Confusing Dispute Over the Future of the Anacostia Playhouse

Before it shut down last year, DC’s Anacostia Playhouse was an important community venue for a neighborhood that doesn’t have much access to theater. Recently, its founder, Adele Robey, has been raising funds to relaunch the theater at its former location in the Anacostia Historic District—but Robey’s successor as executive director says he still runs the organization. The result is a confusing tug of war between two factions that both think they’re the real Anacostia Playhouse.

Robey and her daughter launched the Playhouse in 2013, turning a warehouse on Shannon Place, Southeast, into a black-box theater. The Playhouse staged theatrical productions, readings, and jazz concerts. “It was just astonishing, creative work in a little space with no money,” Robey says.

But in 2022, she decided to step down from her role for health reasons. Stephawn Stephens, who’d been artistic director since 2019, took over as executive director. Robey expected to stay on in a lesser role, helping with children’s programming and some special projects. But as she tells it, Stephens cut her out entirely—Robey says she wasn’t even allowed to get her belongings from the building: “He made a coup, basically.”

In an email, Stephens disagrees with that characterization, writing that Robey was invited to meetings to discuss the transition and could have coordinated to receive her items. He also asserts that the organization was already facing financial challenges when he took over. (Robey insists the group was in good financial health when she left.)

Stephens had a health crisis of his own in late 2024, and at that point he decided to reassess the nonprofit’s future, he says. Court documents show the Playhouse had received two eviction notices in 2024 for failure to pay rent. The theater shuttered for good that December. “Despite the dedication of our staff, artists, and community partners, maintaining a physical space became financially unsustainable,” Stephens writes. (He declined to speak on the phone.) “Rather than compromise our mission or overextend our limited resources, we made the difficult decision” to close the theater.

Now Robey is trying to bring the Anacostia Playhouse back. In July, her new nonprofit group launched a GoFundMe campaign, hoping to raise enough money to return to the vacant black-box theater on Shannon Place. She also recently held a community meeting at the Anacostia Arts Center to raise awareness of the effort.

The news came as a surprise to Stephens, who still considers himself head of the Anacostia Playhouse and is listed as executive director in the nonprofit’s most recent tax filing, from 2023. (The dispute with the landlord was resolved earlier this year, court records show.) Before Robey held the event, Stephens put out a statement on Instagram saying that her campaign was “not affiliated or authorized by the Anacostia Playhouse organization.” Stephens says that while the Playhouse no longer has a home, it’s still an active organization and could end up in a new venue. “Our focus is on reassessing the long-term structure of the organization,” he writes. “We are exploring other options for how we can continue to serve our mission.”

That probably won’t involve staging productions at the original theater—regardless of who prevails. We called up the building’s property manager, who said a new tenant has signed a letter of intent. He wouldn’t elaborate but hinted it might be a different theater group. “If it were all about the money,” he said, “I would have turned it back into a warehouse by now.”

Franziska Wild

Editorial Fellow