For its first decade, the troupe toured small settlements, performing versions of its original antiwar play. Its early success came from adapting each show to the audience, which made the Company beloved by common audiences and suspect to authorities. Twenty-nine years after its founding, the Company performed The Trial of the Empty Chair in a provincial capital. The play told the story of a murdered tax collector but used the names and details of a current royal inquiry. Officials ordered the theatre seized and arrested two actors. That night, the audience refused to leave the square until the prisoners were released. The event, remembered within the Company as the Night of the Unfinished Bow, became its watershed moment: the Company learned that an audience could protect performers, but also that art could place bystanders in danger. Afterward, the Company adopted a rule requiring the Three Calls to review politically dangerous scripts and assess who might suffer if a performance caused a backlash. The rule did not settle the question. Some members believe restraint is a duty; others call it a polite name for fear. The Company later survived a fire at the Grand Stage, an expensive and largely unsuccessful attempt to rebuild it, and a decade of patronage from a foreign court that tried to turn its plays into propaganda. In recent years, short tours and copied scripts have given the Company a worldwide reputation. Its actual membership remains small, while friendly local performers and former apprentices carry its stories onward.

The Grand Stage is a weatherworn amphitheatre in the Company's founding city. Its lower benches are cracked, its roof is long gone, and its dressing rooms have been patched together from old storage chambers. A trapdoor beneath the stage leads to a dry cistern, used as a costume store, archive, and emergency refuge. The Company owns the building but not the surrounding district, and local officials periodically dispute its tax status.