In 1989, Stephanie Weisman, the theater’s founder and artistic director, started The Marsh because she wanted a place for writers and performers like herself to easily develop their performances. It began as a Monday night performance series, just at the time when solo performance was taking off in San Francisco, and it was an immediate success. Every week, four different performers performed for fifteen minutes each at the legendary Hotel Utah, a historic drinking hole formerly frequented by gold miners and Beat poets.

So why is it called The Marsh? The name, The Marsh, a breeding ground for new performance, came out of several months Stephanie Weisman spent living in a house on stilts on the Delaware Bay. The teeming interplay of the marsh terrain and its vast fecundity seemed a perfect metaphor. The Marsh provides the stage and the space to help the artist find their true voice.