How a Small Stage Became an Original Repertory

Gregg Garner’s first one-act plays began with a production problem. Institute students wanted to stage work, and the college could not afford the performance rights to existing plays. Garner was commissioned to write original material they could perform. Between 2012 and 2013, the commission produced five one-acts: In the Dark, What Matters, It’s Elementary, Real Meaningful, and Anonymous.

The settings gave the early work an accessible scale: a dinner party, a television talk show, a coffee shop, a diner, and a support group. Within those familiar environments, the scripts examined class assumptions, rehearsed political positions, personal responsibility, and the difficulty of understanding people without knowing their histories.

The plays translated ideas into encounters between characters. In the Dark used a blackout to unsettle the social arrangements of a dinner party. What Matters interrupted the predictable positions of a talk-show confrontation. Anonymous placed people with unrevealed histories in the same room and asked what their visible behavior could actually disclose about them.

In 2013, Garner founded The Arts at Center Street, a separate nonprofit arts organization serving the wider Nashville community. Its music, theatre, and dance academies connected instruction with opportunities to perform. The organization provided a setting in which original work could develop alongside the abilities of students and community participants.

Garner served as founder, chief executive, and artistic director, combining organizational leadership with writing and production. The work also required performers, musicians, designers, instructors, and people responsible for the practical demands of each show. A script became a production through their combined contributions.

ALIEN: The Musical extended that work into a full-length form. Developed from a song on UnNamed Servant’s Invitation to Exile, it premiered at The Arts at Center Street in December 2014. Later performances included the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and Vanderbilt University. Immigration, belonging, class, and power became questions pursued through characters and a substantial musical score.

The production received First Night’s Outstanding Original Work award for 2015, presented in January 2016. The recognition forms part of the production history, alongside the work of the company that brought the musical to the stage.

Other full-length works included Mental, Homeless, and Breathe: A New Musical. Their subjects ranged from a family trying to understand a relative’s behavior to the effects of earlier injuries on an adult life and a physician’s effort to save his daughter. Each required characters whose circumstances could sustain an audience’s attention beyond a simple explanation.

The early one-acts returned in a 2025 revival, bringing a new generation of performers to scripts first staged more than a decade earlier. Real Meaningful, originally a non-musical one-act, returned in a musical version. The revival gave the original material a further life through new casts and interpretations.

The sequence from a small commission to a repertory of original work is a distinctive part of Garner’s arts history. The writing created opportunities for performance; the organization helped develop the people able to undertake it. The archive records both the authorship of the scripts and the larger company effort that made those scripts part of Nashville’s theatrical life.

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