The Phoenicia Playhouse proudly presents the first Film Screening Event of our 50th Season, an electrifying start to our Local Issues series - “Catskills Energy Future: Film Screening + Discussion”

Saturday, March 21st - Matinee @ 2 pm

Tickets available at the door or in advance here:

Catskills Energy Future is a film screening and conversation about a quiet but consequential shift in New York City’s infrastructure strategy. For decades, hundreds of thousands of acres in the Catskills were locked up to avoid building a filtration plant, freezing development across an entire region in the name of water protection. That era is on the verge of ending.

As filtration becomes an eventual engineering reality, the logic for holding vast tracts of upstate land is changing. New York City is no longer organizing its watershed around protecting water, but as a platform for renewable energy generation, battery storage, and future transmission, tying the Catskills directly to the city’s climate and power ambitions.

This transition is not without precedent. From the earliest days of the watershed system, influential voices argued that the only way to protect city water was to restrict population, suppress industry, and limit human presence in the Catskills altogether. The cold logic of treating people and productive land use as a threat rather than a resource has shaped a century of policy. Today, it risks reappearing in a new form: land preserved not for local prosperity, but for land-intensive infrastructure serving distant needs.

This Saturday, March 21st event, starting at 2 PM, features the third screening of Unfiltered: New York’s Watershed Battle, followed by an audience Q&A examining what this transition means for land use, grid reliability, workers, and local communities and whether the region will once again be asked to absorb the physical costs of New York City’s growth without a meaningful voice in the outcome.

Who We Are

The Phoenicia Playhouse is the home of the Shandaken Theatrical Society, a 50-year-old not-for-profit organization dedicated to bringing community theater to Shandaken and surrounding communities. Located at 10 Church Street in the heart of Phoenicia, the theater was constructed in 1887 by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. Over the years it has housed the original charitable and fraternal organization, an auction house, and a movie house. It is now one of the Catskill region’s longest-lived art organizations. The Playhouse has been an important resource for our community for 138 years. Our goal is to keep it thriving for artists and patrons of future generations.

Our Mission

The Phoenicia Playhouse is a performing arts organization that strengthens, invigorates and promotes the Catskills community. Our mission is three-fold: We produce shows, provide a venue for other shows and events, and create educational opportunities through youth and adult workshops. We are committed to drawing residents (full-time and part-time) and travelers together through the experience of the arts. “Community” is the most important part of “Community Theater”.