Robert Kelley to be Honored by City of Palo Alto

The City of Palo Alto has announced that Monday, August 22nd, Mayor Pat Burt will honor TheatreWorks Silicon Valley's Founding Artistic Director Robert Kelley for his significant contributions to the community. Kelley has been part of the Palo Alto community for more than 60 years; he attended Jordan Middle School, Palo Alto High School, and then Stanford University. He founded TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in 1970 and is believed to be the longest tenured Founding Artistic Director of any major regional theatre company in the country. In 2003, Kelley was honored with the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Paine Knickerbocker Award for Lifetime Achievement, and has received many BATCC Awards for Outstanding Direction. Last season he directed the record-setting production of Jane Austen's EMMA.

Since its founding in 1970, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley has become one of the nation's leaders in cultivating and producing new musicals and plays, developing and premiering more than 66 works by new and veteran artists and over 160 regional premieres. The company's New Works Festival and Writers' Retreat programs attract authors and composers of national stature (Beth Henley, Paul Gordon, MarSha Norman, Henry Krieger, Stephen Schwartz, Duncan Sheik, Joe DiPietro, and Andrew Lippa, among many others), providing an artistic home in which America's theatre artists can create new works. In addition, the company has developed scores of works which have gone on to both regional and Off-Broadway productions. A home for artists developing new works, it was at TheatreWorks thatMemphis, the 2010 Tony Award-winning musical, was first workshopped and received its world premiere.

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is an Equity/LORT theatre, producing eight shows annually, playing to more than 100,000 patrons a year. TheatreWorks continues its dedication to the Bay Area community with increased audience services and subscriber benefits, Wednesday discussion nights, and opening night celebrations in which the community is invited to mingle with writers, cast, and crew. In addition, TheatreWorks offers many public services such as the costume rental program, and the education outreach program that reaches some 25,000 students annually with in-class workshops, student matinees, summer camps, the Young Playwrights Project, the touring assembly Oskar Trilogy, and The Healing Project at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

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