Stage Door artistic director Willie E. Jones III resigns midway into first season

Less than a year after he accepted the job as artistic director at Dunwoody’s Stage Door Theatre, Willie E. Jones III has left the company. Jones resigned just before Thanksgiving, according to board chair Donald Boyken. 

When former artistic director Robert Egizio was furloughed in 2020 — after what Stage Door’s board said was a significant loss of revenue at the time due to Covid — many wondered what direction the company would take for its 48th season. Jones, 22, was hired in March and began this spring, setting an ambitious schedule that included Romeo and Juliet in the fall and additional Shakespeare fare in 2022. His goal was to make Stage Door (formerly known as Stage Door Players) a classical repertory theater company.

Jones’ version of Romeo and Juliet, which opened September 30, “came across OK,” says Boyken, but was not a moneymaker. The board began looking at the remainder of the season at the time, and the company decided to scrap next year’s planned versions of The Miser, Twelfth Night and The Tempest.

“We tried to course correct, and Willie chose that he’d rather do more Shakespeare than go with the direction we wanted to go, so he resigned,” says Boyken, who has been the board chair since February.

In exchange for a larger severance package, Boyken says, Jones signed a confidentiality agreement and a non-disparaging agreement. Jones did not return a phone call or text message from ArtsATL. 

Prior to Jones’ departure, Justin Ball also joined the company as executive director, replacing Debbie Fuse, who had served as managing director since 2018 and had decided to retire. Kelly Johnston also came aboard in July as assistant artistic director. 

“Justin is very talented and has a lot of great theater experience, as well as teaching,” Boyken says. “He is a tremendous asset. One of the big challenges we knew when we hired Willie was his youth, and we needed to have some senior leadership in the theater to replace Debbie.”

Ball, who was hired after a two-month search, served as managing director of the Sharon Playhouse in Connecticut for two years and has also worked at the Manhattan Theatre Club and at the Playwrights Horizons Theatre School, part of New York’s Tisch School of the Arts. An Atlanta resident since 2017, he assumes job duties that include overseeing the organization as a whole, preparing budgets, handling marketing, working alongside the artistic staff for season planning, community outreach and education. 

When Ball started, he thought he would be working in tandem with Jones for a while. “Even before my first day on the job, we had had several coffees together and talked about how we would collaborate,” Ball says. 

He was not completely surprised to see Jones depart, though. “Personally, I understand he has a lot of friends and family in Chicago, so — in that regard — it did not come as a shock to me,” Ball says. “He did what he needed to do.”

Ball acknowledges that he has used this fall season to gather information and do some phone banking with his audience and season subscribers. “We realized there was a pivot that was necessary,” he says. He concurs with Boyken that while Romeo and Juliet was a worthwhile production, the company struggled to meet financial targets with it. 

At the top of Stage Door’s current to-do list now is replacing the canceled shows. In a board meeting next week, Ball hopes to make final decisions that can be announced before year’s end. The company also is looking at its staff as it prepares to move forward, including an acting ensemble of 10 that Jones hired.

“We are honoring our commitment to the actors we brought aboard and not terminating their contracts. We will look at the organizational chart and go from there,” Ball says.

In a recent ArtsATL interview, Jones, who was trained in an ensemble environment, indicated that he felt ensemble performing made the work better and hoped that his performers eventually would appear in multiple shows at once.

Boyken, too, says  it is important to keep the current Stage Door team engaged. “Willie had brought in some different talent and we are going through those folks and trying to figure out what’s best for the organization with who we have so we can keep them gainfully employed and keep them interested in Stage Door,” the board chair says. “We relied on Willie and will rely on Justin now for hiring practices.” 

Although his role is more managerial, Ball expects to have some input into programming decisions. “I think with most theaters there is a dialogue amongst leadership,” he says. “I would not imagine one person would do it in isolation.“

In his recent ArtsATL interview, Jones made it sound like there had been a constructive dialogue, including mutual compromise, with the Stage Door board.

“When I interviewed for the position, they were really able to give me a sense of what they were looking for,” Jones said. “They said they wanted to diversify the audience, cast and creative team, but that they also wanted a new direction. We’ve given a little and taken a little, but what you see onstage and in the education programs we offer is part of that vision.”

Now the vision is changing again.

When Egizio was furloughed, it surprised many people who associated him with the company and credited him with its growth. Boyken says there was no malice toward the former artistic director in the decision to furlough him, but that the board leaned toward a new direction. 

“My in and out of the theater before I became attached was limited,” says Boyken, who came aboard one month before Jones was hired. “I never met Robert and if I did I don’t remember him. Robert did a lot of great work and put us in a financial position so we could weather this pandemic. I have nothing but good things to say. We just have a new focus on where we want to be and because of Robert, I think we’ll get there. We want to be a destination-type theater instead of only a theater in Dunwoody. We are looking to be more than a community theater.” 

Stage Door’s version of A Christmas Carol continues its run through December 19, and The Importance of Being Earnest will open as planned in February. 

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Jim Farmer covers theater and film for ArtsATL. A graduate of the University of Georgia, he has written about the arts for 30-plus years. Jim is the festival director of Out on Film, Atlanta’s LGBTQ film festival. He lives in Avondale Estates with his husband, Craig, and dog Douglas.