"Futures Premiere Here"

This article was originally published in the April 2025 edition of Texas, Town and City magazine.

Futures Premiere Here

By Tim Roberts 

When Milton Farr moved to Mansfield in 1917 he founded two important things: the city’s first electrical plant and first theater. Dubbed the Farr Best Theater by a local newspaper contest, Mansfield citizens finally had a spot where they could go see motion pictures for a nickel. Over the decades, the theater, located right in the heart of downtown Main Street, would change names a few times, change purposes and change owners, but remain a point of town pride and the hub for hometown entertainment.

The City of Mansfield purchased the hundred year old theater in 2017 with an eye toward renovating it as a premiere destination for the cultural arts in Mansfield. The purchase reopened the Farr Best after being closed for over two years, fixed it up to more modern standards and brought a new wave of excitement back to downtown. 

It also brought huge challenges for the small community engagement staff.

Programming the theater proved to be a massive undertaking. Huge amounts of staff time were dedicated to booking acts for the theater, working the box office for the events and promoting each show. Even with all this work, it was still rare for a show to be successful. After the booking fees, staff time, marketing and any contractual help hired, the events would almost never turn a profit due to the theater’s size.

“With 158 seats in the house it’s hard to make shows sustainable and financially feasible,” said Rosalie Gilbert, the city’s Manager of Arts and Event Services. “Just the overhead of concessions and ticketing and staffing those events means we would need to sell every seat to make them work financially.”

Over those first four experimental years of the city’s operation something else was happening. The number of independent arts organizations in Mansfield rapidly grew, increasing by 62% between 2017 and 2021. All of these burgeoning groups needed a place to call home.

This gave the team in Mansfield an idea of how to fill the theater and give these new theater groups, arts organizations, musicians and filmmakers a place to grow.

“At the start of the 2022 season we began what we call the Cultural Incubator Program, and so now the Farr Best is home to around a dozen local artists and arts organizations that present programming here on a regular basis,” Gilbert explained. “Those local arts organizations get a lot of in-kind support, because we do not charge them a standard rental fee, we help promote their events across our social media channels and we just take a small cut of their ticket proceeds.”

Click Here to learn more about the Cultural Incubator Program

Since the start of the program the theater has hosted theatrical productions, concerts, art classes, dance classes, film premieres, magic shows and even ghost hunts. The array of entertainment has expanded far beyond what used to be offered.

And just as operating a theater is a massive challenge, so too is starting up an arts organization. Groups like the Fleetwood Project, a community theater founded in 2019, now have a stage while they build their future.

“So many other rental spaces just aren’t affordable,” said Stevie Dawn Carter, Fleetwood Project founder. “The city makes this affordable for us to use so that we can bring art to this city and I think that’s really critical for our community, for our city, for arts, for culture, we need a space where creatives can afford to be here.”

The Fleetwood Project has produced 16 shows in the theater since 2022, three of which have been world premieres of original locally written scripts, seen for the first time on the stage of the Farr Best.

The total impact of the Cultural Incubator Program has been even more massive. The theater saw a 400% increase in patrons over the first two seasons under the program, over 320 days of use in the theater per year, around $70,000 worth of ticket and class registration sales annually, plus another $130,000 of local spending generated from these events.

This success has led to the expansion of the Cultural Incubator Program to include a Farm & Cottage Market hosted near downtown, and the programming of a temporary Art House, also located on Main Street.

All this led to the International Economic Development Council to give Mansfield a 2024 Excellence Award in Neighborhood Development for the program.

“For us as a city [the Cultural Incubator Program] has reduced our staff costs and our overhead costs significantly and so we have saved a lot of money, while at the same time these groups have filled the theater,” Gilbert said.

The Cultural Incubator Program is now a cornerstone of the cultural arts in Mansfield. With new developments on the horizon, a rapidly growing public art scene and award winning cultural arts events like Arts Week and Music Alley, the city has a clear path ahead.

For over a century, innovators like Milton Farr have been creating culture in Mansfield, and now the work for the next hundred years has begun.

“We are making this a cultural destination in DFW,” said Carter.