Powerstories Theatre

Powerstories Theatre started with a simple question asked during a cross-country bike trip. Founder Fran Powers began asking women along her route, do you have a story to tell, and by June 1998 that question had turned into a nonprofit theatre company built around staging true stories of women and girls. The company debuted publicly in November 2000, when eight women performed the original production Let the Stories Move You at the Friday Morning Musicale, followed by sold-out shows the following year at what is now the Straz Center. More than two decades later, Powerstories still operates from that same original mission, now based at 4237 W El Prado Boulevard in South Tampa.

The company’s programming centers on original and commissioned works drawn from real experiences, staged as intimate, personal theatre rather than traditional scripted drama pulled from established playwrights. Alongside adult productions, Powerstories runs Girlstories Leadership Theatre, a program that gives girls and young women a structured outlet to develop and perform their own stories, building public speaking and leadership skills through the theatrical process rather than a classroom lecture format.

Access is built into how the company operates. Its STAGE Initiative, short for Sponsored Tickets for Access, Gathering & Equity, sets aside subsidized tickets for audience members who might otherwise not attend, and the Girlstories program now accepts Step Up For Students Scholarships, opening the youth program to families using Florida’s scholarship system. The current 2026 season includes productions such as Conscience, Voices of Women: The Studio Series, The Wash, and Raising Twelve, ticketed individually through the company’s online box office.

Powerstories fills a specific and fairly rare space in Tampa’s theatre scene: a company built entirely around amplifying women’s and girls’ voices, run as a nonprofit since a founder’s bike trip turned into a mission twenty-six years ago. For anyone looking for theatre that centers lived experience over polished fiction, the South Tampa space at El Prado Boulevard has been quietly doing that work since well before it became a more common conversation in regional theatre circles.