Sawyer Estes is a theatre director, playwright, and producer currently based in Atlanta.

His play Hurricane Season received its Off-Broadway premiere in 2024 at Theatre Row in New York City. This production from Vernal & Sere Theatre, which he both wrote and directed, was the subject of a profile in American Theatre Magazine released in June of the same year.

He co-founded the ensemble-based Vernal & Sere Theatre in 2016. Since then, Estes has served as the lead artistic vision for the company which has established itself as the foundational experimental theatre in the city with its ten productions in a span of eight years. His work has gained a large and significant audience in a city which is historically more accustomed to traditional forms of theatre.

Estes is unique in that he both writes and directs many of his original productions and adaptations. He is a conceptual director prone to abstraction, stylized movement, and imagery; however, he is also a playwright with a firm foundation in dramatic structure and dramaturgy. His work is distinguished by a particular blend of high style and grounded, naturalistic performance.

He most recently adapted and directed Anne Carson’s seminal masterpiece, The Glass Essay, physicalizing and grounding her lyric essay without omitting a word of Carson’s text. Before this, he directed the world premiere of his original play Hurricane Season. This production was called “thought-provoking and worthy” by Arts ATL and praised for “stretching audience boundaries”.

In the aftermath of the global pandemic, Estes returned his company to the stage with a massive, twenty-one character epic in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. This production, which he both adapted and directed, exploded onto the Atlanta arts and cultural scene with a sold-out run, rave critical reviews, and eventually gained the support and attention of the Buñuel Institute itself. Arts ATL called the work “fascinating, weird, topical, and visually stunning.”

Another credit of note is his 2019 adaptation and direction of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Estes reimagined this text upon the grounds of an American schoolyard, calling into question the fundamental system in which we raise and instruct our citizenry: its miscalculations, its abuses, and its violence. This production caused some controversy in Atlanta and remains a topic of conversation in theatre circles around the city.

More recently, he has become further involved in new play development utilizing his unique blend of dramaturgical analysis and direction. He has become a frequent collaborator at Working Title Playwrights where he helps develop and direct some of their more experimental new plays. In the future, Estes looks forward to continuing to work both within his own company and in likeminded places such as these.

Sawyer is originally from a small town in the Texas panhandle known for wheat production and crude oil. He holds a BFA from the University of Houston where he was mentored by Edward Albee.