American Players Theatre in Spring Green has won a Tony Award | Entertainment

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American Players Theatre in Spring Green has won a Tony Award. It is the first Wisconsin theater to do so in the award’s history.

The American Theatre Wing’s Tony Awards, held every June, honor excellence in live theater performance, design, production and more. The Special Tony Award for Regional Theatre is voted on by the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association. (Editor’s note: Christians is a voting member of the association.)

The award comes with a $25,000 monetary grant and has been regularly awarded to one theater company each year since 1976.

Until 2013, the Regional Tony went exclusively to theaters outside of New York City. The Muny in St. Louis won in 2025; Wilma Theater in Philadelphia won in 2024.

“We are so grateful,” Brenda DeVita, APT’s artistic director, said on Tuesday morning. “It’s humbling and beautiful. So many people who work here could have their own Tony, and they stayed here and helped tell theater stories to people in rural Wisconsin.

“They deserve great stories. They deserve a Tony for believing in this place all this time.”

DeVita and managing director Sara Young credited the early belief of founders Randall Duk Kim and Anne Occhiogrosso, who planted a classical repertory theater company in rural Spring Green more than 40 years ago.

“I go back to those that first decade of the theater, when it was so unlikely,” Young said. “It feels so impossible. The deck was stacked against APT, and the fact that (the audience) stuck with us and were just so loyal … the grassroots effort to reopen (in 1986) was extraordinary, and they’ve been there for us ever since.”

DeVita said she informed APT’s current cast and crew to joyful response.

“They screamed and jumped around and felt proud of themselves.”

Representatives from APT will travel to New York for the awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall on June 7. Notably, American Players Theatre alum and University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate Carrie Coon (“Bug” on Broadway) is up for lead actress in a play, her second Tony nomination. (Her first was for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 2013.)

American Players Theatre produces eight plays in its main season and one show in its fall “shoulder” season each year. This season opens in previews on June 6 with Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”

The company has been receiving more national press in recent years, with features in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (the late theater critic Terry Teachout was an avowed fan).

Still, DeVita said, many people are surprised at the quality of APT when they arrive.

That’s “very, very flattering,” she said. “But boy, we’d like more people not to be surprised, and just be regulars that come here all the time and appreciate it. See the good work people are doing.

“Not everybody can get to big cities and great theater in cities and urban areas,” she added. “The very notion that people can come together and be changed and be community over a story that unites them … that is real, and should happen everywhere.”

Young said the award “means a lot to us,” and to be noticed in the field is “an incredible honor.”

“It is not an easy task to come to APT,” Young said. “The vast majority of our audience drives a distance to get here, and then you get yourself up that hill, or to the Touchstone.

“We are so honored by our audience. It’s their theater. They built this theater, and they kept coming.”

Lindsay Christians is the food and culture editor at the Cap Times. She earned a master’s degree in theater research from UW-Madison and has been a member of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association since 2007. 

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