Local actress Melissa Johnston Price once questioned the drawing power of Carol Piersol’s theater.

During the January 2005 run of the one-man show “Blessed Assurance” at the Firehouse Theatre Project, an ice storm descended on Richmond. As Johnston Price was the show’s stage manager, she headed to the theater, which is housed in a converted fire station.

“I’m slipping and sliding walking across Broad Street, and I’m like, this is ridiculous. There’s not going to be an audience here. Why the hell are they doing the show?” Johnston Price recalls. “I open up the door and the place is packed. For a Sunday matinee after an ice storm. She just had such a loyal audience base. They wanted to see the type of theater she was doing.”

On Tuesday, Piersol, the founding artistic director of both the Firehouse and 5th Wall Theatre, died two years after being diagnosed with brain cancer. She was 71.

A fixture of the local theater scene for more than three decades, Piersol helmed the Firehouse from 1993 to 2012 before launching 5th Wall in 2013; she ran the latter theater until her retirement was announced this February. Piersol's ouster from the Firehouse in late 2012 caused a major rift within the city’s theater scene, drawing headlines and protests.

Over the years, Piersol produced and directed dozens of shows and racked up awards, but her greatest legacy is how she pushed Richmond to perform more edgy, modern work, and how she helped foster the local theater community. Upon news of her death, many theater artists took to Facebook to express their condolences and share stories of what Piersol meant to them; friends describe her as quiet, observant, funny and smart.

• Scott Elmquist
• Piersol addresses a crowd of about 250 supporters at the November Theatre after her ouster from the Firehouse in late 2012.

“Carol was a cornerstone of Richmond theater,” says Bruce Miller, founding artistic director of Virginia Repertory Theatre. “She led the charge towards more adventurous play selection and more challenging subject matter. She was a consummate artist and an engaging colleague who made us all proud to be working in the community with her.”

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Pennsylvania, Piersol studied under renowned actor and teacher Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. Piersol met her husband Morrie in an acting class, and the couple founded an off-off-Broadway theater in New York called Force 13 Theatre on West 13th Street with actor Bill Patton in the late ’70s.

Of his late wife, Morrie Piersol, a theater director and former theater teacher at Appomattox Regional Governor’s School, says Carol should be remembered for her kindness, imagination and desire to foster creativity in others.

“People gravitated and related to her,” says Morrie. “Literally in New York one time, she took a coat off in the winter and gave it to a homeless person. She was that kind of person.”

The Piersols moved to Richmond in 1985 for Morrie’s job with paper company Westvaco, and Carol ended up in an acting class with Janet Wilson. The two began discussing the lack of edgy theater in Richmond and soon cofounded the Firehouse around the Piersols’ kitchen table in 1993 with Bill Gordon, Anna Senechal Johnson and longtime Richmond Magazine staff writer Harry Kollatz Jr.

• Photo courtesy of Thomas Nowlin
• Piersol and Harry Kollatz Jr. cofounded the Firehouse with Bill Gordon, Anna Senechal Johnson and Janet Wilson in 1993.

Before long they were renting out former Fire Station House No. 10 near the corner of Broad and Lombardy streets for shows and fundraisers. Two years later, the city put the building on its surplus property list up for sale. Piersol met with then-Mayor Tim Kaine in an attempt to negotiate a $1-a-year lease with the city. Kaine said that if the theater company could raise $80,000, it could buy the old fire station.

Developer Roy Sutton purchased the building and eventually donated it to the Firehouse. By this point, the founding members, besides Piersol and Kollatz, had moved away.

In the theater’s early years, downtown Richmond was in rough shape with a high homicide rate and many vacant storefronts.

“Broad Street was shut up like a hurt face. People thought we were crazy, and yet they came,” says Kollatz, who served as president of Firehouse’s board for eight years. “They came and they filled our seats because it gave them something they weren’t getting anywhere else.

“[Piersol] was incredibly important and influential and had a vision about that space and how we could use it for the community, and bring to this community [a kind of] theater that they never had seen done before. We brought them [Sam] Shepard and [David] Mamet. We did classics, but works that hadn’t been seen before [locally], either ever or in a very long time.” While the now-defunct TheatreVirginia at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts usually hired professional actors from out of town, the Firehouse was known as a place where local actors could catch a break. After Johnston Price had taken some time off from acting to raise kids, a colleague recommended that she meet with the Piersols. At the time, the Firehouse was auditioning for a lead role in Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?”

“They were so gracious and so giving, and made me feel so welcome,” Johnston Price says of the Piersols. “I did my audition and was hired immediately, and that’s what started this long-lasting, wonderful friendship with both of them.”

The Firehouse also played a role in the creation of other theater companies. Anna Senechal Johnson, one of the Firehouse’s founding members, returned to Richmond and created Cadence Theater Company in 2009; she currently serves as Cadence’s artistic and managing director. Now-defunct TheatreLab started under the wing of the Firehouse. Ghost Light After Party, an open mic piano bar event that is held by Yes, And! Theatrical Co., began as a fundraiser for TheatreLab while it was still under the Firehouse’s umbrella.

• Scott Elmquist
• Piersol studied under renowned actor and teacher Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City before moving to Richmond.

One highlight of Piersol’s tenure at the Firehouse was the time Albee, the playwright famous for works like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” gave a talk at the theater in 2000. Albee was in town for an exhibition he had curated at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Anderson Gallery just as the Firehouse was staging Albee’s one-act “The Death of Bessie Smith.”

Piersol asked if Albee would speak at the Firehouse for a fee, and he accepted; she turned it into a fundraiser for the theater. During the talk, Albee paid Piersol and the Firehouse both a compliment and a challenge. Albee pointed to her and said, “This is the kind of place that should be doing and promoting and finding new American plays,” Morrie recalls.

That interaction inspired Piersol to found Firehouse’s Festival of New American Plays, the winners of which went on to have their plays produced in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The work the Firehouse was doing may have been innovative, but the building itself was still an old fire station with plenty of maintenance issues. Amy Wight, a longtime producer at the theater and former board member of 5th Wall, recalls one of the many occasions that the Firehouse flooded, this time right before its annual fundraiser circa 2011.

“We had one of those epic Richmond rains, and the water started coming in,” Wight says. “All of us are running around in evening gowns and heels. … We’re furiously mopping and moving everything to higher ground, and [Piersol] was completely composed and graceful the entire time. She always, in a crisis, would just figure out what to do and take care of business.”

• Scott Elmquist
• Piersol after addressing supporters at the November Theatre in 2012.

But the Firehouse’s biggest crisis came in December 2012 with Piersol’s noisy ouster. While Piersol had grown the company into one of the city’s most respected and award-winning theaters, some Firehouse board members were frustrated, wanting the operation to evolve and grow past its shoestring budget and small staff. In a 2013 story for Style, Kay Holmes, the then-board president, said Piersol’s disorganization often led to costly last-minute budget changes and that the theater often appeared to be in a state of disarray. The board eventually voted to negotiate Piersol’s retirement; Piersol instead turned in a letter of resignation.

These actions created a rift in the theater community, sparking protests and candlelight vigils outside of the theater during performances. To date, there are still some in the theater community who refuse to step foot inside the Firehouse on principle.

After a nearly two-year stint with local director Jase Smith Sullivan (Richmond Shakespeare's current managing director) as artistic director at the Firehouse, Joel Bassin, who’d previously been the company manager for avant-garde theater company, Mabou Mines, and chair of the theater department at Hunter College in New York City, took over. After Piersol’s tenure, the company became known as the Firehouse Theatre instead of the Firehouse Theatre Project.

Piersol launched a new venture, 5th Wall Theatre, in 2013 with actor and director Billy Christopher Maupin. The theater company continued Piersol’s vision of bringing off-Broadway and experimental theater to Richmond, staging multiple plays annually until the pandemic hit. According to Joe Walton, president of 5th Wall’s board of directors, the company plans to continue producing local theater and is open to hiring another artistic director.

• Thomas Nowlin
• Morrie and Carol Piersol after the Richmond Theatre Critics Circle Awards one year.

Earlier this year, the Firehouse and the New Theatre announced that they were merging, with Bassin retiring and Nathaniel Shaw, the executive director of the New Theatre and former artistic director of Virginia Rep, replacing him. On Wednesday evening, 5th Wall and the Firehouse announced that they plan to raise funds to rename the Firehouse’s stage after Piersol. For the Piersols, that action is a major step toward reconciliation with the Firehouse.

“That, to me, is absolutely huge. It’s the most amazing thing,” says Morrie, adding that Carol knew about the plans before her death and “was happy about it.”

Additionally, plans are in the works for Virginia Rep to host a celebration of Piersol’s life; a date and time has not yet been decided.

For Kollatz, Piersol’s impact on local theater can be summed up by how the Firehouse reacted when Hurricane Isabel took out most of the city’s power in 2003. Somehow, the Firehouse still had electricity, air conditioning, cold beer and a show to put on: “Bat Boy: The Musical,” starring Scott Wichmann.

“People came. They walked. They rode their bicycles. They clambered over fallen trees,” Kollatz says. “They came, and the theater fulfilled its ancient purpose of being a light in the dark. And that is what Carol Piersol was about.”