TheatreWorks (Silicon Valley)

TheatreWorks is a non-profit, professional theater company based in Menlo Park, California and founded in July, 1970. The company is a member of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) and employs some 300 artists annually, including Equity and non-Equity actors, directors, designers and specialty artists. It is the 3rd largest repertory theater in the San Francisco Bay Area behind American Conservatory Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The company stages a year-round season of eight productions - comedies, dramas, and musicals - in the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts and in the California Mission-style Lucie Stern Theatre complex in Palo Alto. The company is currently led by a 24-member board of trustees, a full-time staff of 49, and entertains 100,000 patrons a year including 9,400 season subscribers on a budget of about $7.1 million. TheatreWorkers, the company's volunteer guild, numbers 200 strong.

TheatreWorks began as the dream of Robert Kelley, a Bay Area native who earned his degree in creative writing from Stanford University in 1968. After teaching at Andover Prep in Massachusetts for a year, Kelley returned to Palo Alto, California in 1970. As a musician and occasional actor, Kelley decided he wanted to make his living doing theater. He got his chance when the city of Palo Alto then asked him to launch a theater program that would engage teenagers and reflect the concerns of the community. The result was a powerful and original new musical called, Popcorn, which premiered in July 1970. Popcorn spoke volumes to the local community and reflected the tumultuous changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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