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TheatreWorks Silicon Valley founder and Artistic Director Robert Kelley will retire at the end of the company’s 2019/2020 season (its 50th), he announced this week.
A longtime resident of Menlo Park who staged some of the company’s early performances in the since-demolished Burgess Theatre in the Menlo Park Civic Center, Mr. Kelley is believed to be the longest-running artistic director at an American regional theater company, according to TheatreWorks.
The cheerful, pony-tailed Mr. Kelley founded TheatreWorks in 1970, shortly after he graduated from Stanford University, and has directed more than 170 of the company’s 426 productions.
TheatreWorks’ board of trustees will begin the national search for Mr. Kelley’s successor this year, allowing plenty of time for the transition after the company’s 50th-anniversary season in 2019-20.
“I’m healthy, I still love making theater, and I intend to remain active in support of the company,” Mr. Kelley said in the announcement. “But I believe the half-century mark is a timely and appropriate moment for TheatreWorks to embrace new leadership to continue our growth into the future.
“Following retirement, I hope to remain active with the company, and look forward to being a part in its future growth under a new artistic leader.”
Under his leadership, TheatreWorks has expanded from an experimental youth troupe to the third-largest theater company in the Bay Area, boasting a number of world and regional premieres (including “Memphis,” which went on to Broadway and won the 2010 Tony Award for Best Musical), an annual new-works festival, and educational programs that reach 25,000 students each year.
TheatreWorks used the Burgess Theatre as its second stage from 1979 to 1991, when it began staging major works in the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, according to Palo Alto native Carla Befera, who participated in many early TheatreWorks productions and who now handles the theater company’s publicity. Early in its existence, the company staged performances in a number of locations, including the Baylands. In its second season, in 1971, it performed “Alice’s Adventures Underground” in a parking garage, with audience members descending into a whimsical Wonderland created by the innovative theater troupe, Ms. Befera said.
Mr. Kelley’s announcement that he’s leaving TheatreWorks is the third seismic event in the Bay Area theater world in recent months. Tony Taccone, artistic director of Berkeley Rep, announced in February that he’s stepping down after the company’s 50th anniversary season in 2019; and in March, Carey Perloff, artistic director of American Conservatory Theater (ACT), revealed that she is departing the company she has led for 25 years at the end of the 2017-18 season.
