Awaken with Theater

Many customers don’t know that Winning Coffee Co. doesn’t just caffeinate its customers.
Winning owners established Q-Staff Theatre in 1999, and the physical, experimental theater group does work based on training it received in eastern Europe. The theater group creates pieces from the ground up.

Steven Nery, a Winning employee and Q-Staff tech guy, said owner Richard van Schouwen’s inclination toward the desire to escape the metropolis scene inspires the work.

“There’s a lot of that, sort of, being-in-the-desert-alone feel to it,” he said. “It’s desolate work — very interesting stuff. Not having a good lens on that form of theater in general, I didn’t know what to make of it, other than I liked it.”
While working with Riverside Repertory Theater Company (now Tricklock Company), co-owner Sandy Timmerman took a job at the coffee company.

She said the company catered to her schedule, which frequently required her to be out of town. It’s a practice she has kept alive today in order to foster theater relationships across the country. She and Q-Staff group members took ownership of Winning in 2003 to relieve the former owners’ burden and provide financial means for the theater company to grow.

“In the modern world, arts funding is crap, and so most theater companies have to survive on grants,” she said. “So Winning is basically the financial engine behind Q-Staff Theatre. Yeah, I have to work a kitchen shift, but at the end of the day, I get to do whatever I want with the money … I prefer to sling lattes than write grants.”

The group has a small residential complex near the coffee company that it rents to different artists — graphic artists, puppeteers and traveling artists.

Timmerman said the network between Q-Staff, Winning and the residential complex helps develop a prominent artistic community.
“We started to form this idea that this could be a place where people could stay, live, work, and get their feet underneath them, and then be able to go out into the world, but still have a base here,” Timmerman said. “That’s kind of our hope and our dream.”
Nery compared Winning to the Blue Dragon, a defunct coffee shop/performance space. He said the Blue Dragon was “one of the few sort of lawless, anonymous places” where artists and students could hang out.

“Winning is one of the few places like that in town,” Nery said. “It definitely has that living-room vibe to it.”
About a quarter of Winning employees are involved with Q-Staff Theatre, and Timmerman said, unbeknownst to her, most of the people she hires happen to be artists.

Employee Maxwell Richardson said the artistic population and hub of activity makes Winning a place to congregate.
“Theater for them is like something that’s really community-based, because you get people from your area to come in and see the art you’ve been working on immersed inside the community,” he said. “It’s all very tight-knit.”