Born to Lead: Circle Theatre’s New Artistic Director Ashley H. White Isn’t Afraid to Shake Things Up

Lindsey Wilson·
Dallas/Ft WorthTheater
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When Imprint Theatreworks closed at the end of 2022, Ashley H. White found herself at a crossroads. The founding artistic director had spent the previous five years producing some of the most ambitious and original theater that Dallas audiences had experienced in a good long while, but ultimately the nonprofit just couldn’t survive the pandemic’s decimation of regional theater.

Six months later, the director, fight and intimacy director, and soon-to-be-playwright was announced as the new artistic director of Circle Theatre in Fort Worth.

“I have a sign on my desk that says, ‘if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you,’” White laughs, adding, “and I’ve learned that if I’m comfortable doing something, then I’m not making the right choice. I want everything to feel new to me.”

A surprising fact: Though founded in 1981, Circle Theatre didn’t have an official artistic director until 2018, when original Dallas Theater Center Acting Company member Matthew Gray inaugurated the position. Gray left in 2021, and executive director Tim Long stepped in during the interim. White came on board in late 2022 as interim associate producer, before officially taking the reins the next summer.

“Circle was not ‘me’ when I got there,” White says, referencing the first season she inherited, which included such shows as Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop and Cheryl Strayed and Nia Vardalos’ Tiny Beautiful Things—wonderful shows to be sure, but not new or edgy in the way White had made her trademark. For contrast, consider Imprint’s glamorous feminine rage in the rock musical Lizzie, the beautifully obtuse and intimately staged Ghost Quartet, or an immersive and brutal Murder Ballad that turned the Margo Jones Theatre at Fair Park into a working dive bar, complete with TABC-certified actors slinging drinks when not singing.

“I felt like there was an enormous amount of pressure for my first season at this nearly 45-year-old institution,” White confides. “I didn’t want to alienate the audience while introducing my voice to the Fort Worth community, where I was not known at the time. I knew it was a delicate balance to mix my voice with the voice of a theater with such a legacy.”

One way she smoothed this introduction was by planning fun extra programming that encouraged audiences to feel like the lobby was more like a living room than a straitlaced theater. Live music, wine tastings, gallery partnerships, and even a pop-up tattoo studio encouraged patrons to come early, stay late, and connect with their fellow theatergoers.

For the 2024 season, White estimates she went back and forth on about 20 possible titles with Long. Those that made the cut included Lauren Gunderson’s Artemisia (about the celebrated yet oft-forgotten 17th-century female painter) and Kristoffer Diaz’s professional wrestling play, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity—but Long was on the hunt for a laugh-out-loud classic comedy, “in the vein of Noises Off,” explains White, “but all the big contemporary comedies had been done to death. I said, ‘I’m going to write a punk-rock version of Tartuffe that’s under 90 minutes,’ and Tim snapped his fingers and said, ‘that’s it!’” White pauses. “I had been joking. But then I had to write a play.”

White calls writing her hot-pink-drenched adaptation of Moliere’s 17th-century farce “the most terrifying creative experience of my life—I never had aspirations to write a play!” But the end result was indeed hilarious. Audiences praised the work’s self-aware framing, slapstick physical comedy, and fresh, feminist-forward approach.

“I still can’t believe it happened,” laughs White, who also directed the production. “It was a reminder that art is supposed to surprise you. You start to think you have a thing and then you’re reminded you’re just a creator, and you’ve got to follow whatever that direction is that you’re getting pointed in. Being inside that experience, I never want to do it again—but I know I have to do it again. Building something from nothing, it’s what we as artists do. I’m addicted to it.”

White also got to check a bucket-list show from her directing list in late 2024, when Theatre Three staged the glittering regional premiere of Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812. No stranger to Dave Malloy’s unique blend of electro-pop and folk, plus his complex, ambitious storytelling, from Ghost Quartet, White brought 19th-century Russian society to Dallas with gusto.

Circle Theatre’s 2025 season will continue to challenge, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop joining two more musicals, Ain’t Misbehavin’ and The Last Five Years; the world premiere Destroying David; and the regional premieres of Lauren Yee’s The Hatmaker’s Wife and Erica Schmidt’s Mac Beth. White will direct two of the productions.

“The hard part about making theater is that you create something that is living and growing,” White says. “It’s just like being a parent in that you get to make it, but then it becomes its own thing. I’m a type 3, high-achieving Leo, so I’m always going to be critical of myself and my work, but I’m getting better at understanding that at some point you just have to release it and trust.”

—LINDSEY WILSON

Lindsey Wilson

Lindsey Wilson is a Dallas-based arts writer and critic with a journalism master's from Syracuse University and an undying love for chips and salsa. When not at the theater (which is rare), she enjoys reading, playing with her dogs, and traveling. Photo by Jeffrey Hummel.