A NOISE WITHIN Marks 35th Anniversary With Professional Artist Award

As A Noise Within celebrates its 35th anniversary season, the Pasadena-based classical theater company is marking another significant milestone: the California Educational Theatre Association has honored A Noise Within with its Professional Artist Award, recognizing the company's artistic excellence and demonstrated long-term commitment to theater education in California.

When A Noise Within was founded in 1991 by Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, education was not yet the expansive part of the company it would become. The two had withdrawn their final $3,000 from the bank to produce Hamlet in a large, empty room in the former Masonic Temple in Glendale. They created a thrust-style stage by flanking three sides of the playing space with large wooden pews left behind by the temple, a configuration that would become a trademark of A Noise Within's theater-making style. Following the success of Hamlet, A Noise Within produced two additional productions that first season, then expanded to a six-show repertory season the following year.

Not long afterward, a company member volunteered to execute an idea that would become one of the cornerstones of A Noise Within's education program: student matinees. With the green light from the company, she grabbed a phone book—this was, after all, the 1990s—and began cold-calling teachers in Glendale, Pasadena and Los Angeles.

The program grew gradually. Today, more than three decades later, student matinees are a bedrock of A Noise Within's education programming. Each school year, the company presents approximately 30 to 33 student matinee performances, welcoming approximately 11,000 K–12 students between September and May. A Noise Within also offers heavily subsidized tickets to college and university student groups attending evening and weekend performances, bringing the company's annual student reach to approximately 18,000 students.

Student matinees can provide students with new ways to understand literature, history, and even their own families. Its annual Summer With Shakespeare theater camp began in the mid-1990s with 20 students and now welcomes up to 150 students each summer. In 2026, the program expanded to include a Theatre Tech Intensive, giving teens interested in stage management and design an opportunity to develop technical theater skills in response to feedback from the local community.

In fall 2025, A Noise Within reinstated its Youth Theatre Classes, providing school-year opportunities for young people to study and train in Shakespeare and other classic playwrights.

The company also offers several free programs designed to support the next generation of theater artists and arts leaders, including the Teen Leadership Council, Theatre Immersion Program, and annual Teen Monologue Festival, serving local teens interested in acting, design and theater administration. Four Teen Nites throughout the season additionally welcome teenagers who want to experience A Noise Within's productions as individual audience members.

Together, these programs reflect a 35-year commitment not only to introducing young people to classical theater, but to creating pathways for them to become artists, audiences, educators and advocates for the art form themselves.