Driving up highway 101 going North through Marin and Sonoma counties and beyond, it’s easy to leave the “big city” jitters, pressures and excitement. Views of rolling hills, old oak trees, cows in pastures and vineyards quickly slow your pace and encourage your mind to wander. But make no mistake, the North Bay is pulsing with vibrant theatre scenes. With a strong and growing subscriber base, community (and sometimes even municipal) support, and a bank of theatre artists who are happy to forgo the attraction of sometimes more lucrative work to perform where they live, companies are growing in ways that would make some big-city companies sigh with admiration. As the North Bay continues to grow both in population and economy (think medical companies, Hewlett-Packard, the wine industry, tourism, some affordable housing), savvy directors and actors can look forward to expanding audiences and support.
 

The area continues to boast a number of veteran theatre companies who produce full seasons in their theatre home of many years. Ross Valley Players, Novato Community Players, The Mountain Play, Marin Shakespeare Festival and Cinnabar Arts Center in Petaluma are examples of companies that attract theatre artists from around the Bay Area and beyond for their auditions and casts, with a loyal subscriber base from both their communities and the Bay Area at large.
 

Several Artistic Directors were interviewed for this article. Going north from the Golden Gate, Marin Theatre Company’s Artistic Director Lee Sankowich continues to bring the classics, musical theatre and contemporary drama to his Equity theatre in Mill Valley. This season MTC continues its new play program with fully mounted productions in their second space, a “black box” housed next to their main stage. “We’re devoting ourselves to bringing in playwrights and developing their work with hopes that the work moves on to our main stage and other companies”, Sankowich reports, “Within the next year, we plan to commission a new play and make this a part of our ongoing commitment to new works.” Sankowich will have a busy year coming up. While continuing his role at MTC, he also takes over the role of Artistic Director at Center Repertory Company in Walnut Creek. He sees this as win-win situation for both companies, “We plan to co-produce two shows a year. This will assist both companies with production costs and enable us to produce shows we might not have been able to do otherwise. In addition, this gives both companies more negotiating power when seeking rights to plays as there is a higher gross potential for any one production. It also guarantees actors involved longer periods of work with performances in both Walnut Creek and Mill Valley.”
New kid on the block down the road from MTC is MCT, “Marin Classic Theatre.” Housed in downtown Novato and producing in San Anselmo’s “The Playhouse”, this new company was founded by Ben Colteaux, serving as Executive Producer, and Artie Gilbert, serving as Creative Director. Mr. Colteaux wants MTC to be “an outlet for American classic theatre to keep the heyday of American theatre (1930s-50s) alive, breathing life back into an era of American theatre that was too soon forgotten.” They will produce 3 shows a year, 2 dramas and 1 comedy and describe themselves as a “stock theatre company using professional actors.” They also have an “Actor’s Academy” with classes for both youth and adults.
 

A little further on up the freeway and next door to Sonoma State University lies the Spreckels Performing Arts Center. Opened in 1990, this center and its resident Equity theatre company are one of the North Bay’s best kept secrets. A municipal non-profit organization, its Artistic and Founding Director Michael Grice is an employee of the City of Rohnert Park. With Grice’s guidance, the city established an endowment fund in 1990 and the interest offsets many of their production costs. They have a mailing list of some 40,000 and a diverse audience with 70% of its patrons from outside the city limits. Its resident theatre, Pacific Alliance Stage Company, is also the only Equity house in Sonoma County. During an interview with Callboard, Grice reflected upon the challenges ahead by asking: “How can a community build and sustain a performing arts center with professional entertainment and keep it affordable to local residents?” For the past 11 years, Grice and his company have found ways to successfully answer the question, and no doubt will continue to do so.
West of Santa Rosa in the hip, small town of Sebastopol, Sonoma County Repertory is going global. Co-artistic director Jim dePriest just returned from Cuba and will return in November to direct the Spanish translation of Steve Martin’s “Picasso in the Lapin Agile”, the first American to direct in Cuba in modern times. He will work with the National Theatre of Cuba. Word is spreading around the global theatre community… Co-artistic director Diane Bailey was recently in Amersterdam and when she introduced herself at a theatre company office there, they had heard about the Cuba exchange and SCR. dePriest and Bailey are Los Angeles transplants who have built this “County wide regional theatre” for the past 10 years. Although they have produced both at their Main Street stage in Sebastopol and in an additional space in Santa Rosa for 5 years, they have now left the Santa Rosa space. They are concentrating on expanding in Sebastopol where they have support from both the City Manager and the City Council.
 

Featured in Callboard and on the northern boundary of Santa Rosa, Actors Theatre continues to impress and dig deep. Its new season brochure includes a quote from the Callboard article, “A Theatre Utopia in the North Bay”, and Artistic Director Argo Thompson is clearly proud of the company that was founded 18 years by a collaborative group of actors, many of whom remain with the company. He is envisioning a day when Actors Theatre is a combination of “Steppenwolf, Berkeley Rep and Ashland…a core company where everyone is elevated by each other’s work, well supported by the community, and a regional center for theatre with multiple performance spaces.” Using both their performance spaces in the Luther Burbank Center, their ambitious season includes “contemporary” and original theatre that “has not been produced before around Santa Rosa”.
 

When asked about issues of diversity in their play selection, actors and audience members, all interviewed for this article affirmed that they continue to seek plays that will reflect their growing audiences and changing communities. Now that several companies are focusing on new plays from around the world, actors of diverse ethnicities and races are sought after and cast, though several directors lamented that it was often difficult to find and cast actors of color.
 

Based on their reports and upcoming seasons, theatres in the North Bay continue to thrive and expand in new directions. They benefit from a rich regional history of artistic exploration and expression, theatre artists who are experienced and dedicated, audiences which are growing, as well as community support which includes city government, private industry and the devoted patron.