In Development
Reykjavik Legacy
On the 40th anniversary of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit that nearly ended the nuclear era, Tonic is mounting a multi-city international tour — Washington, DC to Reykjavík to Vienna — built around Richard Rhodes' acclaimed play about the 1986 summit. The initiative spans stage, podcast, and screen, and is developed in collaboration with Ambassadors Thomas Graham, Jr., Laura Holgate, and Bonnie Jenkins, the World Institute for Nuclear Security, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds to midnight. The tour runs October to November 2026.
Tonic Grange
A civic campus model that refuses to separate the things human beings actually need: culture, nourishment, learning, and each other. At its center is the theater. Around it, a vertical hydroponic farm, a Refettorio-model community kitchen, and an early learning center — all connected at their roots, designed to sustain one another. Tonic Grange: Theater of Life, our documentary series currently in pre-production, is the first expression of that model on screen: a love letter to Washington, DC told through its tables, its stages, and the neighborhoods that hold it together.
Film & Television
A Developing Slate
Tonic's R&D lab moves projects from raw historical and journalistic material through expert collaboration, audience testing, and iterative workshop development — until they're packaged for film, television, or hybrid formats. Current projects include Worth, a historical drama tracing the real-life prototype for Conan Doyle's Moriarty across the Civil War, the Paris Commune, and the Gilded Age; Black Tides, a historical thriller weaving Sherlock Holmes, Theodore Roosevelt, and Nellie Bly into the Spanish-American War; Acacia, a serialized thriller seeded from firsthand hostile environment training experience; and Pictures at an Exhibition, a globe-spanning heist film with something to say about who owns what.
“We’re part institutional in the sense that we do require constant fundraising to keep the theater going, but we’d like to limit that if we could. Hopefully, we can also make money in the general marketplace on our material... So we’re also interested in the commercial world. Ideally, we would like to have no support from anybody except our audience."
Joseph Papp
ABOUT US
Tonic Theater Company was born in Washington, DC — a city that runs on big ideas, hard conversations, and the belief that what happens in a room can change what happens in the world.
We started with a conviction that hasn't changed: theater should be for everyone, and when it's done right, it doesn't just reflect the moment we're in — it helps us understand how we got here and imagine something better. Our subject is history and science: the forces, decisions, and discoveries that made the world we live in. We take those subjects seriously enough to research them rigorously and seriously enough to put them on a stage.
Our work lives in multiple forms — live productions, documentary film, podcast, public forum, educational streaming — because the audiences who need this work most aren't always able to get to a theater. We produce plays that take creative risks, develop projects with the historians and diplomats who lived the events, and forge partnerships with communities that have stories worth telling. We care about craft. We care just as much about who gets to be in the room.
If you've ever left a theater feeling like something shifted — that's what we're after, every single time.
