Dunaway Gardens prepares to host Sundance and playwright labs
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Dunaway Gardens will include a 700-seat outdoor amphitheater. Photo: Courtesy of Louis Jay Giusto/Dunaway Gardens
After decades of success as a Grammy Award-winning producer and songwriter, Tena Clark is turning her focus to the next generation.
- Clark is helping aspiring creatives break into the entertainment industry by hosting two residencies at a former go-to hub for artists and actors.
Driving the news: Dunaway Gardens, Clark's sprawling property in Coweta County, will host its first-ever Playwright Lab this spring.
- The program, which runs April 14-20, will be led by playwright Philip Himberg.
- New and seasoned playwrights, composers and literary advisers will collaborate, brainstorm and fine-tune concepts and pitches in a secluded setting.
- From May 15-20, Dunaway Gardens will welcome the Sundance Institute Episodic Lab program, a six-day residency that allows early-career writers to work with more experienced producers and executives to develop and nurture their projects.
The big picture: The upcoming residencies will precede the first phase of Clark and the Dunaway Gardens Foundation's mission to restore the site and honor the woman who originally founded the artistic retreat.
What they're saying: "It was quite a coup and a big deal to get those in place," Clark told Axios. "It was about a year and a half to two years in the making."
Flashback: In 1916, actress Hetty Jane Dunaway married booking agent Wayne P. Sewell, who inherited the original 22 acres that eventually became Dunaway Gardens.
- The property, developed under Dunaway's direction, served as a training center for actors, producers and directors and hosted musical and theatrical productions throughout the 1930s, '40s and '50s.
- It included an outdoor amphitheater, a restaurant, cottages and lush gardens.
- Dunaway and Sewell died in the 1960s, and the property was transferred to a relative. It was sold in 2001. Clark bought the original property and the surrounding land, which totals 376 acres, in 2022.
Zoom in: Once completed, Dunaway Gardens will have a lodge, cottages, tree houses, a restaurant, screening room, an events center, swimming pool and a spa. The outdoor amphitheater will be restored to seat 700 guests.
- Keith Robinson, Dunaway's executive director of the historic gardens, said the restaurant will be "farm to fork" and will center on seasonally and locally grown produce.
- "I think that primarily it will honor what we are growing here in a really beautiful way," he said.
- Plans also call for constructing a space for the Debbie Allen Dance Academy and a recording studio, which will be done in phase two.
The bottom line: Clark told Axios she hopes writers "won't be able to imagine writing anywhere else" when they visit Dunaway Gardens.
- "It has a long history of just the creativity that was born there," she said. "It literally just exudes out of the ground. ... You feel it when you're there."