Robert Kelley’s last day on the job at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley isn’t until next summer but he’s already contemplating its future without him. Earlier this month while rehearsals for the 18th Annual New Works Festival were spilling into every available space, Kelly and I spoke on the phone. The company’s founding artistic director found an empty dressing room to tell me that the leadership staff is hoping to have a new director in place before the end of the year. The timing would allow for a six month overlap to ensure a sense of continuity between the new hire and the fifty years he’s devoted to the organization. “I feel like it isn’t just a part of my life, it is my life,” he says.
The main, unselfish and forward-thinking reason he gives for retiring at the end of the season is, “to make sure that it’s healthy and that it continues to grow into the future far beyond me.” In June, Kelley flew to New York to accept the 2019 Regional Theatre Tony Award for TheatreWorks. During his acceptance speech, he recalled that, in 1969, the cast of his first production filled his car with food on opening night. Kelley obviously didn’t go into the profession to make a fortune.
“I got into the theater as an actor as a child. My interest was being on stage not in being in the audience,” he says. Later, he started directing plays when he was in college. Once he’d started the company though, Kelley wasn’t ever tempted to leave TheatreWorks for the allure of the Chicago or New York theater scene. Kelley explained that, “We were doing the kind of work that I wanted to do, really, from the beginning. A great mix of classics that you could reinvent in ways that were a huge amount of fun.”
“A lot of new works we could develop from scratch,” he adds. “That’s how the company got started, with a brand new musical.” In December, their 70th world premiere will be a musical version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
TheatreWorks didn’t start with a manifesto or a business plan. “Our goal was to create work that was about our region,” he says. And as the region got bigger so did they. Expanding on that idea, he notes that, “the growth curve of TheatreWorks reflected the growth curve of the Silicon Valley as a place and as a concept.” And yet, he says, there isn’t a huge amount of corporate support for the arts in Silicon Valley. The “backbone” of the organization is the subscription audience, “wonderful individuals who care deeply about us.”
Kelley is also hopeful that younger audiences in a post-Glee world who traditionally do not go in for annual theater subscriptions are discovering the thrill of watching things live, “of actually seeing a real person acting and showing you aspects of life you may have never considered. There’s nothing like seeing someone sing in a musical.”
