Mission Statement
Board of Directors
History and accomplishments:
TheatreFIRST was established in 1993 as a nonprofit professional theatre company, dedicated to bringing the finest works of international drama to East Bay audiences. Since our first production in 1994, we have focused our efforts on bringing to our audience drama that throws light on diverse cultures. Our plays have come from places as far apart as Argentina, France and Australia, and have looked at events as diverse as the Israel-Palestine conflict, perestroika in Russia, aid to the developing world, and post-Pinochet political life in Chile.
We seek to produce theatre to a very high standard. We use professional actors, mostly members of the actors’ union, Equity. Despite our restricted budgets, our professionalism and programming continues to attract some of the best theatrical talent in the Bay Area to work with us. Critics have consistently called attention to the high standard of acting on the TheatreFIRST stage.
We are also committed to the support of the Bay Area artist. From the very start, even when we had no consistent sources of funding, we paid all the artists that worked with us. Originally established as an artists’ collective, the company has now evolved into a more traditionally structured arts organization, but one where company is important. We respect the contribution of artists who have worked with us as we have grown, and we continue to offer them opportunities to work as we are able to reward them more adequately.
Between 1994 and 1999, we produced theatre in Berkeley at the Julia Morgan Theatre. In 1999, we moved to a new, more suitable (smaller, more intimate) space in north Berkeley. Unfortunately our residence there was cut short, and we were rendered homeless. In November 2001, after a long search, we opened our first subscription season at the Oakland YWCA, a historic landmark designed by Julia Morgan. In 2003, the YWCA decided to change its programming priorities, and once again the search began. In 2004, TheatreFIRST was honored to be appointed Theatre-in-Residence at Mills College in Oakland. However, this proved too far out for many of our audience members, so our 2005-6 season will be produced at our new performance space, the Old Oakland theatre at 461 Ninth Street in downtown Oakland.
Artistic Accomplishments
On March 4, 1994, having raised more than $10,000 from individuals thanks to the 1,500 hours of volunteer service by TheatreFIRST’s founding artists, TheatreFIRST opened its inaugural production, the U.S. premiere of Under a Mantle of Stars by Manuel Puig, acclaimed Argentinean author of Kiss of The Spider Woman. The six-week run at the Maggie Crum Theatre in Walnut Creek was favorably reviewed in the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times, and generated more than $2,500 in revenue above production costs to be applied to a subsequent production.
In July 1994, TheatreFIRST initiated a series of readings of plays under consideration. The readings serve as a sounding board for the company to elicit public response and choose plays that reflect the prospective audience’s interests and concerns. TheatreFIRST continued this series of readings for the next five years at Holy Names College, and more recently at Borders Books in Emeryville.
Through this process, the company identified its second production, The Golden Age by Louis Nowra of Australia an intensely moving drama concerning the fate of a group of primitives discovered in the Tasmanian outback in the 1940s, which Judith Green in the San Jose Mercury News described as “unforgettable”.
Production of The Golden Age began a fruitful relationship with the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts in Berkeley, owners of the historic Julia Morgan Theatre. This organization was very impressed with TheatreFIRST’s work and offered to make TheatreFIRST its resident theatre company. TheatreFIRST produced there continuously until 1999.
The Golden Age was followed by Anything to Declare?, an early twentieth century French farce by Maurice Hennequin and Pierre Véber in its U.S. premiere. This highly successful four-week run at the Julia Morgan Theatre in spring 1996 was completely funded by box-office receipts. Moving again to matters of more serious consequence, our next show was David Hare’s deeply moving drama Racing Demon, about church ministers trying to do good works in the poorest neighborhoods of London.
Christopher Hawthorne in the East Bay Express called it “a beautiful, soaring edifice of a play”, and “an ambitious undertaking, justified by its results”. Again this was a Bay Area premiere of an important new play, which Steve Winn of the Chronicle selected as one of his top picks of the fall season.
From there it was back to France. The Ladies of the Camellias is an American play (by Lillian Garrett-Groag) about the two great women of the world stage at the turn of the century, Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt. Wonderfully played by local actresses Wanda McCaddon and Elizabeth Benedict, the play was received with great appreciation by our audiences. This was followed by Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman’s tense hostage drama recalling the horrendous human rights abuses of General Pinochet’s régime in Chile. The SF Bay Guardian called it a “startlingly raw production”, while Christopher Hawthorne praised the “strong performances” and its “pressurized energy”.
Then, in January 1999, TheatreFIRST staged the Bay Area premiere of Dennis Potter’s powerful play about childhood during wartime, Blue Remembered Hills. Described by Kerry Reid in the Express as a “highly admirable production”, she praised the cast’s “stellar performances” and gave it her Critic’s Choice award. Robert Hurwitt in the SF Examiner lauded its “mesmerizing intensity” and called the production “direct and vital”.
At this point, TheatreFIRST chose to move to a smaller space in north Berkeley at the Thousand Oaks Baptist Church, in order to create a stronger, more intimate bond with our audience, and to avoid spiraling rents at the Julia Morgan. Here the company produced Nagle Jackson’s The Quick-Change Room. Set backstage in a Leningrad (soon to re-emerge as St. Petersburg) theatre, the play paralleled the fall of communism, the rise of capitalism, and the dislocation and loss of artistic and social integrity that followed. The production, attended by the author himself, was greeted with warm applause from both audiences and critics. Unfortunately, TheatreFIRST was unable to continue producing at this location, and for the next two years the company was forced into hiatus, while a new, affordable performance space was located.
In 2001, a new home was found at the Oakland YWCA, and TheatreFIRST took the bold step of announcing its first subscription season. Love & Understanding was our highly successful inaugural production: it played for 15 performances in November and December 2001, and garnered regional awards for both acting and direction. Rob Hurwitt in the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the “beautifully detailed performances”, while Jack Tucker in the West County Weekly (Contra Costa Times) called it “a gem…tight, funny, piercing and moving”. Chad Jones in the Oakland Tribune said the show “marks the welcome return of a crackling good company”.
Our next play was The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson, winner of the 2000 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy, and focusing on three daughters coming together on the eve of their mother’s funeral. This was another Bay Area premiere, running from February 14 to March 10, 2002. As a measure of our success, our audiences increased by 40% over the previous production.
The season ended with The Colour of Justice, edited by Richard Norton-Taylor. On April 22nd 1993, Stephen Lawrence, a black man, was stabbed to death in south London. Five years later, nobody had been prosecuted, despite eyewitness accounts being given to the police within hours of the crime. The play is derived directly from the transcripts of the inquiry into the police’s failure, and is a powerful exploration of the sources and attitudes that lead to institutional and endemic racism. With a cast of 30, the U.S. premiere of this epic piece ran from May 2 through May 26, 2002 to considerable acclaim and widespread media interest. Again, audiences increased by a further 40% over the previous production.
TheatreFIRST presented three outstanding premieres for its 2003 season, with the theme of the collision of cultures. First up in January was Via Dolorosa by David Hare. This monologue, performed to great acclaim by the author himself in London and New York, recounts his visits to Israel and Palestine. In conversations with artists, politicians, settlers, historians and journalists, Hare reveals, in extraordinarily perceptive detail, some of the less well documented dimensions of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and illuminates it in a way that only a writer of his caliber can. This extraordinarily timely and vital piece of theatre was toured to the Oakland Islamic Cultural Center, the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center, and A Traveling Jewish Theater in San Francisco. It was a major success, attracting the largest audiences yet to any TheatreFIRST production. Leslie Katz in The Examiner called it “an exhilarating, enlightening, one-of-a-kind theatrical experience”, and exhorted readers: “Don’t miss it.”
Sue Townsend’s The Great Celestial Cow, a funny and moving portrayal of an Indian family moving to England in the seventies was produced in March and April. It provided an extraordinarily clear-eyed recounting of the immigrant experience, exploring it from the perspectives of different generations and genders. The show was a success with both critics and audience, and was well attended by the South Asian community. This was the play’s national premiere, and was hailed by Chad Jones in the Oakland Tribune as “an udder delight”.
Finally, we returned to David Hare, and his 1985 play A Map of the World. Set at a U.N. conference on aid to the developing world, the play pits a brilliant but cynical Indian comic novelist against an idealistic young left-wing journalist. But far from being simply a debate about the virtues of Western aid to the Third World, the play also explores the gap between public politics and private principle, and the way events are distorted when retold by novelists and film-makers. This extraordinary, prismatic play opened June 6th, and was the play’s California premiere. It attracted some of the best press yet for TheatreFIRST’s work, including from the Chronicle’s Rob Hurwitt, who found it “riveting”. Once again, our audiences were highly appreciative, and this was reflected in a 40% increase in numbers over the previous season.
In 2004, we were restricted to a single production, as our relationship with the Oakland YWCA came to an end, and we were forced to seek another venue at short notice. In April and May, we produced Mooi Street Moves, Paul Slabolepszy’s award-winning comic drama set in Johannesburg in 1993, just as apartheid was being dismantled. The venue was the Berkeley City Club. Responses to the show were overwhelmingly positive. Indeed, Lisa Drostova in the East Bay Express began her review by writing: “Somebody needs to give TheatreFIRST a big pile of money and a dedicated space of their own”. She went on to praise both the play and the acting, and finished by saying: “Once again, Chafer has brought us a play from another country that shows us something important about our own – yet another reason it’s so important audiences continue to support TheatreFIRST so thay can keep going.here…” Robert Avila in the SF Bay Guardian likewise praised the writing and the acting, as well as the technical production, saying “it all serves wonderfully to focus an already intimate stage on two magnetic performances”. Such was the response that the show was extended for an extra weekend, bringing the total number of performances to 20.
In September 2004, we opened our first season at Mills College with Peter Nichols’ modern classic Joe Egg, an intensely moving black comedy about parents dealing with bringing up their severely damaged child, Josephine – the Joe of the title. The play featured six of the finest Bay Area actors, and was warmly greeted by press and public. This was followed by the U.S. premiere of Fronteras Americanas, a hilarious and touching solo show about the greater Latino-American identity. TheatreFIRST attracted a very diverse audience for the piece by successfully reaching out to the local Latino community in Oakland. The result was a great success for the company, and a new audience base on which to draw for future shows. In May 2005, TheatreFIRST closed its 2004-5 season with the Bay Area premiere of Making Noise Quietly, a trilogy of short plays about the long range effects of war by Robert Holman, which Robert Avila in the SF Bay Guardian called “subtle and artful”, while Chad Jones in the Oakland Tribune praised the acting: “Butler and Carey are fantastic”.
Throughout the first seven years of TheatreFIRST’s existence, we also produced a series of staged readings. From 1997-2000 this was on a monthly basis at Borders Books in Emeryville. In 2004, we moved the series to the Barnes & Noble store in Jack London Square, with resident director Erin Gilley at the helm. These readings have been springboards for plays we have considered producing, and for plays we like, but cannot afford to produce. In either case, they give a small but dedicated readings audience a chance to hear new and untried scripts in the exciting atmosphere of work-in-progress. A regular audience of around 40 people show up on the third Tuesday of each month to listen to and comment on a play in workshop performance. Admission to the readings is free.
The Future Starts Here
TheatreFIRST is at an extremely exciting point in its development. As we move back downtown in our new Oakland home, we are reaffirming our role as Oakland’s only season-producing professiopnal company, and continuing our work to establish theatre as part of the cultural landscape of this resurgent city.
This is a long term, multi-faceted strategy. Our programming has embraced and will continue to embrace the exploration of cultures other than that of the majority in the Bay Area today. Our outreach includes a strong commitment to young people, too many of whom are simply unaccustomed to experiencing theatre, and underserved audiences, for whom many of our plays are deliberately selected. All our tickets are available for all performances at half price to people under the age of 25. Furthermore, each show has at least one “Pay what you can” night – which for many means a free performance, since there are plenty of people who would like to enjoy theatre, but cannot afford it at today’s often exorbitant ticket prices. No one will be turned away from TheatreFIRST for want of the price of a ticket. (Ticket prices range from $10 for previews to $22 for single tickets on Fridays and Saturdays.) Seniors are encouraged to attend our Sunday matinées, which are scheduled to finish before darkness falls. Students and seniors are offered discounts for every performance, as are members of Theatre Bay Area, of which we are a proud member. All TheatreFIRST venues are also wheelchair accessible.
In 2004, TheatreFIRST was given two important awards: the GOLDIE (Guarian Outstanding Local Discovery Award) for Best Theater by the SF Bay Guardian newspaper, and the Best Small Theatre in the East Bay award by the East Bay Express. These acknowledgements of our achievements are both welcome and significant. They mark a new stage of the company’s recognition as a major contributor to the area’s cultural life.
In short, TheatreFIRST is a proud part of Oakland and the East Bay’s cultural community, and looks forward in the coming years to consolidating its position as one of the finest theatre companies in the region, and the kind of theatre a great city like Oakland deserves.