The History of NSP According to Alissa Jones:

These boys are so dumb.

At the end of my senior year of high school, which was the end of their freshman year of college, Nick and I had this idea to put up a show over summer break. Mikey and Rohde had the exact same idea and the exact same time. Funny, huh?

We talked about it and decided we didn’t want to do it for money because we only wanted to practice what we were learning in school so we decided to sponsor a charity and donate all the proceeds. We decided on Easter Seals Jayne Shover Center. We contacted them and Sylvia Garcia at Easter Seals was very interested in us. She kept asking us what we were called and since we weren’t an actual company we decided to take the boys high school band name “Nothing Special” and create Nothing Special Productions.

The first summer we produced WASP by Steve Martin and Boys’ Life by Howard Korder. They were a huge success. We had so much fun that six months later over winter break we decided to produce another show. We did The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) by The Reduced Shakespeare Company. After that show we were pretty much invested in what we were doing. We became a 501©3 Not-For-Profit. We then went on to produce shows on our Summer and Winter breaks throughout college always sponsoring a charity of some sort. As of late we have been producing a lot of original works including work-shopping a production of Eroica by award-winning Chicago playwright David Alex.

Now we are over four years old. Crazy. We were always told, “Don’t start a company with your friends. You’ll hate each other by the time you’re done.” Well, sucks to them. I think we’ve done a pretty good job so far.