Bringing down the curtain on 50 years in the theater
Final season begins for founding artistic director of TheatreWorks
Robert Kelley had a recurring nightmare before this year’s Tony Awards ceremony.
He dreamed the teleprompter broke and he’d have no idea what to say when accepting the Tony Award for Best Regional Theatre on behalf of TheatreWorks, the company he founded in his hometown of Palo Alto 50 years ago.
But when he got to New York’s Radio City Music Hall on June 9, he found himself surrounded by Broadway vets such as Montego Glover and Danny Burstein, old friends who had worked with him at TheatreWorks. They made him feel at home and illustrated how deep and wide are Kelley’s roots in the theater world.
“TheatreWorks is a dream come true. And a lot of people have shared that dream,” says Kelley, who remains as modest and plainspoken as he was back in 1970, when the company made its debut. And the family atmosphere was there from the beginning. He recalls that on the troupe’s opening night, the cast filled his car with canned goods, which he lived off for a year.
The dean of the Bay Area theater scene is stepping down at the end of TheatreWorks’ 50th anniversary season, which kicked off Saturday and runs through June 2020. And Kelley is leaving with the same humility he started with.
“Directing is a joy for me,” says the 72-year-old, toying with one of the model sets he has used to direct and which he has stashed in the treasure trove of memorabilia that frames his office. “It always has been. I had no hope that it would ever pay the bills or be an
actual career. I got lucky.”
“Robert Kelley created more than a theater — he created a community and a network of artists by fostering an environment that celebrates new work,” says Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Rajiv Joseph, whose “Archduke” was presented at the company in June. “This is why TheatreWorks is such a vital theater in this country and why it was so deserving of the Tony Award this year, because Kelley made a place where the American theater could grow and flourish.”
Kelley, who sometimes is called simply Kell, says his first salary was the princely sum of $50, and he’s only partly joking when he says he shared his first closetsized office with a few brooms.
His impending departure comes during a time of change in the Bay Area theater scene, as the directors of several key Bay Area companies have stepped down: Berkeley Rep’s Tony Taccone, American Conservatory Theater’s Carey Perloff and Aurora Theatre’s Tom Ross.
The commitment to having a theater company as diverse as the region it calls home is part of what has defined TheatreWorks, along with Kelley’s unflagging sense of hope for the future. Cynicism isn’t his style. He picks plays that are as bighearted as he is.
“From the beginning, Kelley has maintained an unshakeable optimism in the human spirit and in inclusion,” says Broadway actor Francis Jue, who is starring in TheatreWorks’ season-opening show, “The Language Archive.” “He will never know the myriad ways in which he has nurtured and enriched countless artists and audiences.”
Frequently clad in jeans and a baseball cap, his gray hair pulled into a ponytail, Kelley has never lost the emotional connection to his colleagues or his passion for developing new plays. Fresh out of Stanford, he staged the world premiere of an antiwar musical, “Popcorn.”
“This is where I grew up. It’s my home. We wanted to create something for our community,” he says. “That’s why we have always reflected the spirit of Silicon Valley, the belief in innovation.”
Kelley also is known as an exacting visual director who spends hours tinkering with the tiny action figures in his model sets to figure out the movement for a show. And he has been known to stand atop his desk and drop prop leaves onto the floor to watch how they waft.
“He loves having things fall from the sky in his show, and he wants to make even the leaves fall just the right way,” says stage director Jeffrey Lo, “to make the stage picture just how he’d like it.”
He’s also a sentimental soul. Kelley has a memento from almost every show the company has done. One of the longest-serving founding artistic directors in the country, he has directed more than 175 shows at TheatreWorks. And he has sought to push the company to new heights even when money was tight. In 2002, hard on the heels of the dot-com bust, Kelley and his board launched a new works festival when others would have focused on money-making ventures.
“If this were a supermarket, you’d call new works a loss leader,” he chuckles. “We thought we’d have to do it for years to really find our footing. But in that very first festival, there was ‘Memphis.’ ”
Not only did “Memphis” make it to Broadway and win the Tony for best musical, it also established the company’s national reputation for life-affirming material that resonates in today’s world. The troupe will mark its 70th world premiere with Paul Gordon’s “Pride and Prejudice” this season.
Kelley hopes the company he grew from a ragtag troupe to a $9.8 million organization will someday have its own theater instead of bouncing between two venues — the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts and the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto. But he remains a practical man.
“This is not an easy place to acquire real estate,” he says. “Living in Silicon Valley, it ain’t easy.”
Changing with the times is part of the secret of his success. A new artistic director will be announced this winter. But Kelley’s mark on the company remains indelible.
“It is a testament to Kelley to have evolved his artistic vision with the times, to remain a vital force in American theater,” says Broadway producer Randy Adams (“Come From Away”), former managing director at TheatreWorks. “He has created an astonishing legacy that will live on for a very long time.”