When you hear the Devon Street neighbors tell it, the outcome of the Alexander Burns story was foreshadowed right from Act I, Scene I.

The Burns family lived in one of the big houses tucked onto the tree-lined block, and Burns and his siblings played with the kids on the street and in each other’s basements throughout the late 1980s and ‘90s. But Burns wasn’t rounding his pals up to shoot hoops or watch MTV. 

The future artistic director of the Quintessence Theatre Group was directing them.

“The first play I saw them do was a compendium of the civil rights movement,” recalled neighbor Carole Carmichael, then an editor at the Philadelphia Daily News. “I was heading out to work one morning, and Alex stopped me and said, ‘Where are you going? It’s Martin Luther King’s birthday!’

“The schools had begun to close for the holiday, but businesses at that time did not,” she said. “So the kids gathered, and the play was written that day. I think there was a lot of drama just to get the play into production.

“But that evening, when we convened, that play had Rosa Parks riding the bus,” fashioned from a large cardboard box that had recently contained Carmichael’s new refrigerator.  “At the very end of the play, MLK is killed with the vacuum cleaner.”

Today, at Quintessence, Burns runs a considerably more sophisticated operation. The critically acclaimed group launches its 15th season of classic and contemporary theater this fall, after extending its most recent season in April with encore presentations of a smash “Macbeth.” 

The company made headlines this summer with the news that its board of directors would purchase its home of 14 years, Mt. Airy’s historic Sedgwick Theater, for $2.3 million. Shortly after, the National Park Service awarded Quintessence a $290,000 grant to restore the Sedgwick’s grand 1928 façade and marquee at 7137 Germantown Avenue. 

The purchase encompasses about half of the original theater space: the lobby, a large room used for concerts and events, and a large, flexible “black box” that Quintessence outfits with a moveable stage and seating for its productions. Upstairs office space and three retail spaces on the Avenue – a welcome new revenue source for Quintessence – were included in the acquisition, though the original cinema auditorium, at the rear of the property, was not. 

The rooms are still adorned with many of the art deco trappings from William Harold Lee’s original design. The high arches, hand-painted plasterwork, gilded mirrors and chandeliers need restoration, yet still provide inspiration, Burns said.

Historic theaters such as the Sedgwick “really are palaces – they were called movie palaces – so for the work we do, with (plays featuring) kings and queens, the space itself helps create the grandeur.” 

Presenting classic and modern plays in such a majestic space has been Burns’ goal since childhood. 

His mother, Lisa Hemphill-Burns, was a costume designer for the People’s Light theater company, in Malvern, when her son was born. “He lived in his playpen at People’s Light from the very beginning,” she said. 

Later, when she was director of the theater program at Germantown Friends School, “He would always come after school to watch rehearsals, and the kids loved him. It never stopped.”

These were the years that the Devon Street productions were just getting started. Burns’ cast and crew were all around.

“There were more kids on that street than adults,” Carmichael said. “There were multiple families with multiple kids. So if you were an athlete, there were kids who were athletes. If you were into theater, those kids were there for you. And if you were just quiet and didn’t want to be bothered, there were those kids too.”

“When the kids were young, they were together constantly,” recalled Ellen Brown, a retired attorney whose son, Daniel – now a filmmaker – was a frequent collaborator with Burns. 

“The two of them did nothing but put on productions. Everyone was dragooned constantly, constantly” to participate. The Browns’ basement was a regular venue for their plays and films, which included, Brown said, “a shot-by-shot recreation of Stephen King’s ‘Misery.’”  In summer, the Burns family traveled to their camp in Nova Scotia, where Alexander and visiting friends from the city staged plays and magic shows as the Lake Annis Players.  

“I always felt it was my job to arrange a play for the block party, usually a musical, fully costumed, maybe with some little smoke cannons,” Burns said. “We did a lot of Stephen Sondheim, because I was very into that as a sixth- or seventh-grader. 

“People were gracious enough to watch us for long periods of time,” he added, laughing.

John King Burns, Alexander’s father, handed down different influences to his precocious son. “He was the force in my life that gave me a sense for business,” the younger Burns said. International travel with his father, a commodities executive, “made the world seem smaller. I’ve always been comfortable walking into a new space, both personally and artistically.”

When his father’s work brought the family to live in London for two years in the mid-1990s, Alexander eagerly joined the audiences in London’s storied West End theaters. “It was the heyday of British theater,” he recalled, with stars including Judi Dench and Derek Jacobi in Royal Shakespeare Company productions.

“I made him write about each show,” Hemphill-Burns remembered. “What worked, what didn’t. He was so fortunate to be completely immersed. He’d just jump on the Tube and go every night.”

Back home, the teenaged Burns joined Germantown Friends productions, sang in the Philadelphia Boys Choir, and did lighting for shows at the Cheltenham Center for the Arts. It was becoming clear that what he really wanted to do was direct. While he stood in the chorus, and someone else was directing, “I was actually watching the entire event and strategizing all the moving pieces,” he said, “doing what a director has to do.”

At Northwestern University, Burns connected with the director Frank Galati, renowned for his Tony-winning direction of Broadway hits “Grapes of Wrath” and “Ragtime.”  Burns’ internship started with carting the director’s groceries, and ended with serving as assistant director on two of Galati’s Chicago-based productions. One was headed for Broadway when the attacks of September 11, 2001 scrambled plans for the show.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” said Burns, who’d hustled to complete his college degree in three years. “You just have to be incredibly flexible, and keep focused on what you want to do.”

Burns ended up continuing his studies and directing shows around the country – Shakespeare in Texas and Washington, D.C.; Ibsen in New York. His time at the capital’s Shakespeare Theatre showed how classical theater could succeed as the focus of “a massive, multi-million dollar institution – and that was really exciting to me,” he said. 

Returning home, Burns was frustrated that Philadelphia could not seem to support a full-time home for classical theater. 

“I thought that was really strange, specifically because tourists come from all over the world to see history here,” he said, noting that the Founding Fathers “were very much part of the theater, going to the theater, having conversations about it. They were looking into the past to understand the future.”

Shakespeare in particular “Is kind of the humanist gospel, and it needs a temple to support it,” he said. 

“Building a home for the classics to look forward, as well as backward – it’s a thrilling challenge for an artist.”

Faced with the prospect of working his way up in an existing company, or starting his own, he teamed with Pamela Reichen, a colleague from the Shakespeare Theatre, to launch Quintessence in 2010. Its home would be the Sedgwick Theater, which Burns remembered as the Sedgwick Cultural Center of his youth.

Burns, now in his early 40s, was getting ready last month to begin rehearsals for Quintessence’s 15th season. The company he founded has consistently earned plaudits for its interpretations of classic and new works, and revenues have risen steadily. His personal life seems blissful, as he married actor Daniel Miller, his partner of eight years, on Lake Annis this summer.   

His old friends from Devon Street are still supporting the work. “They send all of their critiques,” Burns said, “and all of their love.”       

Ellen Brown recalled: “When Alex started Quintessence, we didn’t have a whole lot of money to give him. But we had room, so we housed his actors” who needed a place to stay in their Mt. Airy home. (Quintessence has since become an Actors Equity theater, improving the salaries and benefits that once made couch-surfing a necessity for some players.) 

When her husband Albert Brown passed away in 2020, the family suggested donations in his name to Quintessence. “He probably saw every one of their productions since opening,” the Brown family noted in his obituary. “They could use some extra help through this tough time.”

And Carmichael, who watched Burns’ early musicals and magic shows under the lights in a neighbor’s basement, is now a member of Quintessence’s Board of Advisors. 

The company’s recent purchase of the Sedgwick Theater is “such a coup,” she marveled. “That whole strip of the street has life to it because of the theater. 

“And when I think about the lights in the basement, it’s like pulling the threads through. He worked his tail off to get this, with the board people and his staff all pulling in the same direction.”