The year 2024 marks Compagnia de’ Colombari’s 20th anniversary season and the triumphant return of Everything That Rises Must Converge to Rome for four performances with workshops and talkbacks fifteen years after its premiere at the International Flannery O’Connor Conference in Rome, organized by the Poetics and Christianity Project in 2009. The show has toured the USA and internationally since and is embarking on a tour across America through October following the performances in Rome. 


ETRMC will be witnessed for the first time in Texas, Ohio and North Carolina, with performances at two New York State detention centers and a return to New York City, Colombari’s home base. 


The theatrical adaptation of Everything That Rises Must Converge was first developed (with two other stories, A View of the Woods and Greenleaf) at the University of Iowa in 1998, at Sundance Theatre Lab in 1999, and Off-Broadway to sold-out audiences at New York Theatre Workshop in 2001.


Karin Coonrod is the sole adaptor of O’Connor’s works for theatre, given permission directly from the estate. She felt called to bring O’Connor’s–a compelling, courageous, and controversial writer–worlds and words to the stage after encountering her stories at age 19 in an American literature class. To Coonrod, O’Connor is the American Dante, from the red clay of Georgia to the realm beyond.