Drama Dock bids a fond adieu to Lisa Peretti
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, July 9, 2025
As a young girl, Lisa Peretti auditioned for a part in Drama Dock’s very first production. She didn’t get it.
Four and half decades later, in the COVID year of 2020, she took over the beloved, almost 50-year old local theater company and served as its administrative and artistic director for the next five years.
Having retired at the end of June, Lisa can claim many accomplishments: the transformation of a community theater into a semi-professional small theater with paid staff and paid performers; a stable organization that delivers plays and musicals of consistent quality and attracts support from government grants, private foundations, and deep-pocketed individual donors; a loyal and enthusiastic audience base; and a reputation within the Vashon artistic community as a credible, trustworthy, and well-intentioned institutional partner that welcomes and nurtures good people and good work.
A Vashon native who studied, taught, and performed in England and Germany, Lisa gracefully combines a down-home island background with a professionalized European sensibility that has enabled her to sense how the remarkably diverse Vashon community wants to be both entertained and challenged.
Among the wide range of Drama Dock’s uniformly successful productions over the last five years, Lisa likes to point out these milestones: Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” the first live show under her aegis, which she produced, directed, and designed; “Winghaven Park,” an original musical she composed, wrote, and produced in its sold-out local run and which is now under development in London; J. B. Priestley’s “An Inspector Calls,” which she directed and designed; a musical version of “As You Like It,” co-produced with the Vashon High School drama program; and two recent postmodern theatrical experiments, Lucas Hnath’s prize-winning “A Public Reading … ” and Rajiv Joseph’s “Gruesome Playground Injuries.”
Lisa may be retiring from Drama Dock, but she isn’t disappearing. She will be doing some more playwriting and composing, collaborating occasionally with Drama Dock, and spending quality and quantity time on the island and in England with her husband, Paul Stephenson, their children Frank and Ava, and members of the West End theater company developing “Winghaven Park.”
She sends best wishes to all her co-workers at Drama Dock, especially long-time board member Gaye Detzer, artistic associate Samantha Sherman, and incoming interim artistic director Kelly Godell.
Bill Epstein, an island theater-maker, is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Arizona and has produced, directed, written, and acted in productions on campuses and in notable non-profit and commercial theaters in the U.S. and Britain.
