Five women walked into a New York rehearsal room from five different starting points — and stayed together to build something.. Ana Radice-Morras, Violet Levinson, Roxane Pes, Isabella Candillier, and Carolina Buhck left their homes and families, and arrived to the city for the same reason: a conservatory program at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, and a working career in theatre and screen that had to be built from scratch on a new continent. They met and trained together. Then, they founded Red Door Productions because the careers they wanted were not going to be handed out at the audition stage.

Built By Outsiders

The shared experience of displacement runs through everything Red Door has put on stage. The five founders are interested, on the page and in performance, in what happens to people when their closest relationships come under pressure: family, friendship, romance, and the moments in which those bonds either hold or break. The material is personal because the founders have lived through it. Each of them knows what it is to be far from the people who know you best.

Pes, the company’s resident director, puts the brief this way: “As an all-female collective of international artists, our work explores the volatility of human connection — family, friendship, romance — and how those bonds are tested, fractured, and reformed under pressure. How people reach for each other even in the most isolating moments.”

That sentence is the closest thing Red Door has to a mission statement. It is also the reason the work tends to feel emotionally specific rather than thematically tidy. The company is not pursuing themes; it is pursuing the kind of room a play creates when characters cannot escape each other.

Five Founders, Five Jobs Each

In a traditional production, an actor enters after the material is chosen, the script is locked, the director is hired, and the schedule is set. At Red Door, the actors are in the room for all of it. They select material. They handle budgets. They negotiate venues. Pes shapes the staging. The four actor-founders step on stage in the productions they have spent months building from the inside.

Carolina Buhck, who has begun co-writing for the company in addition to acting, puts the logic plainly: “It’s a female-led production company in New York, born from a desire to create the kind of work we wanted to be part of. For me, producing has never been separate from acting, but an extension of it — a way to create meaningful opportunities as a performer rather than waiting for them to appear.”

The argument is not unique to emerging artists. Margot Robbie produced Barbie and Wuthering Heights. Emma Stone co-produced Bugonia. At the top of the industry, the same idea is operating at studio scale: actors deciding which projects exist and which roles they get to play. Red Door is doing the same thing at the scale available to a New York theatre company in its third year.

What Each Founder Brings To The Room

The five careers do not look identical, and the company depends on that.

Radice-Morras has played lead and principal roles in four New York stage productions, spanning Off-Off-Broadway and Off-Broadway, including one selected for a New York theatre festival. She has lead and principal credits in three independent short films, with another screen project upcoming, adapted from a downtown stage work by a prominent playwright. She has co-produced four New York theatre productions, including Edward Allan Baker’s Dolores.

Levinson has played leads across three New York productions, from Off-Off-Broadway to Off-Broadway, and has co-produced three sold-out runs. She is co-producing Dolores alongside Radice-Morras, and she writes. A short film of hers is in pre-production.

Pes is the only one of the five who works primarily as a director. Before Red Door, she assistant-directed short films, commercials, and music videos in France, and directed three French shorts of her own. Her Off-Broadway debut as a director was the company’s Five Women Wearing the Same Dress.

Candillier has played principals in two Off-Broadway plays — Five Women Wearing the Same Dress and A Dead Man’s Apartment — and took on the artistic director role for an Off-Off-Broadway production. She has starred in two independent shorts, co-produced two Off-Broadway runs, and is producing a short film she has written. She also handles graphic design for the company’s productions.

Buhck performs across film, television, and stage, with a lead in an American independent feature heading to Amazon Prime, a recurring role in an upcoming Dutch television series, and a lead performance in the David Guetta music video Kill the Vibe. Her co-written play, New York, New York, was accepted into the Gene Frankel Theatre Festival from a field of more than 150 submissions and will run there in August.

An Oversold Debut, And A Calendar That Does Not Slow Down

Red Door’s Off-Broadway debut was Alan Ball’s Five Women Wearing the Same Dress. The four actor-founders took the roles, Pes directed, and all five produced. The run oversold. In January 2026, the company returned to Studio 17 with Sitting Around Baker’s Table, a double bill of two Edward Allan Baker one-acts: Face Divided, directed by Kirsten Russell, and A Dead Man’s Apartment, directed by Marcel Simoneau. That run sold out and drew a notice from Front Row Center. The company has also been covered in Westside Spirit / Our Town, Broadway World, Thinking Theater, and Theater Mania.

Dolores opened May 12 at Under St. Marks, with Sinead Hogan and Coralie Bradnam under the direction of Matthew Danger Lippman. Then comes Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Crimes of the Heart, produced by Radice-Morras and Levinson and directed by Eve Bianco, running July 15–26 at IRT Theater in the West Village. The play is a tragicomedy about three sisters navigating crisis, scandal, and the complicated ties of family — exactly the kind of story Red Door was built to tell. Candillier’s short film and Buhck’s New York, New York are slated for later in the summer, and another stage production is scheduled for September.

A Modern Model For Working In Theatre

What Red Door Productions is making the case for, by working the way it does, is a model of the artist that the industry is still catching up to: collaborative, self-driven, unwilling to be defined by the roles other people are willing to cast. Five women, told for the length of a conservatory program to wait for the right audition, decided collectively that they did not have to.

The proof that the bet is paying off is not a manifesto. It is a sold-out winter, a May opening downtown, a July run at IRT, an August festival debut, and a September production already on the books.