Part of our renovation programme involves moving our office. Currently it resides in the main theatre building, towards the back corner—a space where it has been ever since the building was converted into a formal theatre in 1978. Long-term plans for the property involve moving the administrative and box offices out of that building altogether. Ultimately, we plan to build dedicated spaces for those offices. In the meantime, we are moving the offices into what was originally the caretaker’s cottage.

This month (May 2025), we finally pulled the trigger on the air-conditioning system. As a cultural non-profit company, we got out customs duties waived, and we put our order in!! Work has AT LAST begun!

One of the things we found out about the Black Box was that there were trees impacting it. When Struckum donated their termite-ridding services back in 2022, they were not able to fumigate the Black Box because of these trees. So one of the first things we did when we started to collect contributions was invest in some tree trimming and tree removal, mostly around the Black Box and the caretaker’s cottage.

The first instalment of the money arrived on March 5, and renovations began in earnest. Work began on the Winston V. Saunders theatre as soon as we could mobilize. First up: repairing the bathroom roof which had been damaged three years earlier in Hurricane Isaias. And we couldn’t repair the roof without refurbishing the bathrooms, could we? So the bathrooms were completely gutted.

The first thing we did was build the Treehouse Deck: an outdoor space converting some of the grounds that were not easy to reach owing to a tangle of tree roots into a deck where things can happen. We started building it in March 2025. Watch its progress below.

We began this year in a state of near-despair. Our main theatre had been closed since 2020, and there was no hope on the horizon of its being able to re-open. The cost was beyond our capacity. We were producing theatre—good theatre—but all we had was a 70-seat theatre which had no hope of raising the kind of revenue we needed to make even the most basic repairs we needed. Audiences knew that if they were at the theatre and there was a rainstorm, the actors might appear onstage with buckets or umbrellas, because the Black Box leaked over the stage area. And the 85-year-old main theatre was crumbling. Trees were growing out of walls.

And then: A raffle was launched, and the government of The Bahamas came through with enough capital investment for us to rejuvenate!!

We went to work making the theatre the space of our dreams.