Like many other women passionate about community theater in northern New Jersey, Laura Iacometta felt there weren’t enough roles for women like herself in community theater. That is exactly why she started OffBook Productions. Iacometta is the founding and artistic director of OffBook, a female-focused nonprofit community theater company based in northern New Jersey. In 2026, she has brought two politically relevant productions to local stages.
Opening in February 2026, OffBook presented The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later at The First Reformed Church of Little Falls. Following that, in June, the company will be at the Hackensack Performing Arts Center for an all-female production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. For Iacometta, both shows reflect something she looks for in every production she chooses. “I mostly only do anything that has a political bend to it,” she says. This season is no exception.
Iacometta came to directing the long way around. A painfully shy kid growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, she found her voice through acting school in New York. A performing career never quite materialized for her. “I just was not what anybody was looking for at the time. Not the tall blonde ingenue,” she says. She joined the military at 28 to train as a surgical tech, became a registered nurse, and spent 30 years working at the same hospital. She never stopped doing community theater on the side, but it remained exactly that: something on the side.
Iacometta started OffBook in 2016 after having a stroke that prompted her to reconsider how she wanted to spend her time. She kept running into the same problem every time she showed up to audition for community theater. “If there’s an audition call for somebody in my age group, 65 women would show up for one part, and the next day they would be saying, ‘We need more men,’” she says. She decided to start her own company and do things her own way, which meant an all-female cast and productions that supported nonprofit causes.
Her first production in 2017 was a costumed and staged concert version of 1776, performed entirely by women and benefiting Planned Parenthood. It had 28 women in it and was immediately well received. “I told people to make donations in some Republicans’ names so they get the certificates,” she says. Since then, OffBook Productions, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, has grown into a theater production company with more than 10 productions to its name. It has a dedicated following, and a reputation for big casts and socially conscious theater. “I like to give people a chance to be in a play who normally wouldn’t get a chance,” Iacometta says. “Maybe the role was really small, and they just want to get their feet wet, or they’re getting back into acting, or they don’t think they can tackle something big.” This is the philosophy of inclusion that shapes every production she directs.
That sense of inclusion extends beyond the stage. OffBook has become a space for young people exploring their identities. “We have young people running our sound and stuff, and they came out as nonbinary to us,” Iacometta says. “They felt that OffBook was the safe place for them.” She has been out since she was 16, and that visibility has always been central to how she runs the company.
Over the past two years, more LGBTQ people have joined the OffBook community. “There’s a rainbow in our logo, so people know who we are,” she says.
In October 2024, OffBook staged The Laramie Project, a play built from interviews with residents of Laramie, Wyoming, following the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. For Iacometta, it was one of the most rewarding experiences of her directing life. The original script came with a second piece included: The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. She didn’t read it until the first production had closed, and when she did, she read it in one sitting.
“It’s so well written,” she says. “And again, it’s timely about what’s going on, because there was a great cover-up and excuses and what the media did to turn around the narrative.” The ten-years-later script examines that revisionism directly, and looks at how the people of Laramie have reckoned with what happened in their town and what the rest of the country decided to make of it.
“Revisiting it 10 years after was very interesting, and it’s very current,” she says. Iacometta’s vision for the production draws direct comparisons between the national and local themes surrounding Shepard’s murder and the stories still making headlines today. It is the kind of connection that community theater is uniquely positioned to make, bringing a national story into a local room where audiences can sit with it together.
“These stories from our history can be told differently, with new, fresh voices,” she says. “We can still learn from them and be entertained by them.”
While the script is written for eight actors covering roughly 60 roles, Iacometta cast 25 people in smaller, more tailored parts. Several cast members from the 2024 production returned, and new actors joined the company as well. The show was staged at The First Reformed Church of Little Falls, an all-inclusive church with a food pantry that has become OffBook’s home base. A portion of proceeds benefited the Matthew Shepard Foundation, as it did with the first production. Judy Shepard’s foundation has been a cause close to the company’s heart since they first staged the original Laramie show.
Following Laramie, OffBook will present Sondheim’s Assassins in June at the Hackensack Performing Arts Center. The 1990 concept musical examines the lives and motivations of the men and women who have killed or attempted to kill American presidents, exploring their inner lives, their grievances, and the price of the kind of infamy they were chasing. Iacometta sees it as deeply relevant to the current moment. “These stories from our history can be told differently, with new, fresh voices,” she says. “We can still learn from them and be entertained by them.”
She has been thinking about the show in the context of gun violence, conspiracy theories, and the mythology that grows up around certain kinds of American grievance. Sondheim’s show, written more than 30 years ago, has only grown more timely. OffBook held auditions for the musical this spring. Staging the production at the Hackensack Performing Arts Center gives the company more room to work with than their church home base. The larger audience capacity of the 200-seat venue means the production can reach more people.
For Iacometta, the word “community” in community theater is not just a label. OffBook donates a portion of every show’s proceeds to an outside organization, brings high school students in to work on productions, lends props to other companies, and holds talkbacks after performances so that audiences can engage directly with the subject matter. “The whole word ‘community’ means a lot to me,” she says.
Iacometta is approaching 75 and has no plans to slow down. She says, “I’m still excited about what I do.” She is still searching for shows with a message, still building a community around them, and still making sure that women, and anyone else who has been told there is no room for them, have a place on the stage. She encourages audiences to see a show and get involved. “I think it is my responsibility to bring good theater, but also to look for shows that have a message,” she says. “That’s what I want people to see. Come and see what it’s about and have an opinion.”
