Mission and values:
Silk Moth Stage is a professional theater company that produces place-based, artist-centered, and audience-connected plays in Rockingham County, Virginia.
As a starting point, we borrow Shakespeare and Company’s definition of the classics: The highest truths, universally told, with healing powers.
Silk Moth Stage is a small professional company. We expect artists to behave in accordance with generally accepted standards of professional behavior, which includes respecting other artists, challenging oneself to grow in one’s art, and creating a collaborative environment where we can all push ourselves to take risks.
We invite people to reconsider what a theater experience can be. Silk Moth Stage performs in an outdoor environment, using devised theater techniques to engage the imagination. The audience surrounds the performance space. Before and after the show, artists and audience connect to talk about our shared experience of story creation. At Silk Moth, the audience is a crucial piece of the work. Their imaginations provide most of our tech.
We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, religion, disability, caregiver status, or any other trait, except where required by a specific play. For example, if a playwright says that a character is a Black man in his 60s, we honor that description, as we are required to do by law and licensing agreements. We deliberately seek out artists and audiences of historically underrepresented groups.
Silk Moth Stage was founded by Aili Huber, a professional director and dramaturg living in West Rockingham County. The American Shakespeare Center, where Aili earned her MFA, brought her to the Shenandoah Valley in 2004, and she stayed.
Inspired to create place-based, audience-centered work in the spot where she’s rooted, Aili began dreaming aloud with area playwrights and actors in late 2020. She constructed a stage on the front of her house in early 2021.
Aili appreciates the support of our board in guiding this project. 2025 Board members are:
- Holly Labbe, President
- Pam Mandigo, Treasurer
- Liz Marin
- Francisco Escalera
- Sarah Enloe
- Elio Cortina, Youth Member
The Silk Moth Stage values:
- Equity and accessibility
- Honoring artists’ time, training, and talents (this means, among other things, that all artists are paid)
- Place-based creation, honoring the land and the community where we belong
- Joy
What People Say About Our Shows
It is clear that SMS’s leadership cares deeply not only for the type of art they produce and the audience they serve, but they consistently strive to ensure a positive working environment for artists.
Melissa Moschitto, playwright of Artemisia’s Intent
I couldn’t have imagined that going to an outdoor theatre in rural Virginia would be so utterly magical. [Diana Black’s] performance was a revelation of vulnerability and we were talking about the play for days afterwards.
Audience member for Underneath the Lintel
The affecting performances of the five-person cast, Wonder of Our Stage made a powerful case for the very act of making theatre as the constant yearning towards becoming more human.
Dr. Peter Kirwan, in a review of Wonder of Our Stage
What happens at Silk Moth Plays
Silk Moth Stage creates an experience where people will come early, enjoy food together, toss stones in the Dry River, meet the cats, and chat in hammocks, all while enjoying live music.
They experience a play together, one that is a new classic.
As the play ends, so does the day; our performances are timed to end at sunset. The end of the play isn’t the end of the evening. Artists and audience join together around a fire as the lightning bugs begin to flicker, to reflect on the questions the show raises, the truths it tries to tell, and the wounds it begins to heal.
Silk Moth Stage 