TheaterWorks At 30: From Underground To Edgy To Adventurous

When it was newly born, it was small and adorable and made a lot of noise. In its early years, it was a bit of a loner, finding its voice. In its teens, it was able to hang with the cool kids. By its 20s, it represented a new generation, getting attention and respect from its elders.

Now, at 30, TheaterWorks — the theater that takes pride in being unsettling — has settled down a bit.

“When I came to this theater, 23-and-a-half-ish years ago,” says Rob Ruggiero, “it was wooden risers and folding chairs.” Now he sits in a beautiful office in the 233 Pearl St. building that TheaterWorks has owned since 1994. The building is currently undergoing some renovations, including the addition of a new rehearsal studio space.

TheaterWorks was founded in 1985 by Steve Campo, who ran it for more than a quarter of a century before resigning from his artistic director and executive director posts in 2012 because of health issues.

“Steve and I are very different,” says Ruggiero, who assumed the post of producing artistic director at TheaterWorks in 2013. “He’s edgier, more unconventional. I’m more of a people person. It was kind of a yin yang.”

Michael Albano, a longtime member of the TheaterWorks board, explains that the organization has moved “from a founder-centric theater to a more traditional alternative theater. It’s still very much TheaterWorks.” Overcoming a period of instability during the time of Campo’s leaving, TheaterWorks has expanded its operating budget and its staff, including the hiring of the organization’s first director of development, Dina Silva, two and a half years ago.

Ruggiero says that when he first joined the company in the early 1990s, there was a season-subscription base of 1,500 to 1,700 people and an annual budget of $750,000 to $800,000. “Now it’s 5,200 subscribers and a $2.3 million budget.”

“We were ‘underground’ at first. Then there was a time when we were ‘edgy.’ Now we’re adventurous. We try to do plays and stories we feel passionate about. Steve taught me: ‘Know who you are. Base what you do on that identity’.”

TheaterWorks has marked its 30th anniversary in ways both traditional and unconventional: There was a gala party with “dancing under the stars” on March 1.

The final show of the 30th season, “Midsummer” opened last week and runs through Aug. 21. It has many of the classic TheaterWorks ingredients: vulgar language, sexual situations, live music, a small cast and lots of energy.

TheaterWorks’ 31st season will feature one of its largest-scale productions ever: the musical “Next to Normal.” It is also offering new works by playwrights familiar to TheaterWorks audiences: Mark St. Germain and Hartford’s own Jacques LaMarre, plus the Connecticut premiere of Dominique Morisseau’s drama “Sunset Baby.”

There’s even a book to celebrate the anniversary. “TheaterWorks: 30 Years of Art” compiles 116 show posters and half a dozen season posters plus a handful of program covers, newspaper stories and other ephemera. The book was designed by Dennis Russo of WondriskaRusso Associates, who has created promotional materials for the theater since its inception. A perverse image for “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” (one that was utterly unrepresentative of that play’s content) caused a stir in 1988. Sexy pictures were used more subtly to sell the shows “I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti” and “Take Me Out.” Classy text-driven designs were used to promote “True West,” “Four” and “Oleanna.”

The book, for sale in the TheaterWorks lobby for $20, also contains a useful list of all the main productions TheaterWorks has staged since opening in the fall of 1985. The playwrights who dominated the first decade of the theater were David Mamet (with five productions), Lee Blessing (also five), Sam Shepard (four), John Patrick Shanley (three) and Lanford Wilson (one full-length and two one-acts).

It was at the end of the 1994 season that TheaterWorks made its first foray into biodrama with “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” (about Billie Holiday). That show returned the following season and again in 1998, and paved the way for shows about Pearl S. Buck, Paul Robeson, Maria Callas, Tallulah Bankhead, Ella Fitzgerald, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Joan Didion, Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr. and others.

Comedies at TheaterWorks have ranged from the yuppie romance “Key Exchange” in 1987 to Christopher Durang’s “Laughing Wild” in 1992 to John Leguizamo’s “Mambo Mouth” and “Spic-o-Rama” in the mid-’90s to the home-grown recent hit “Christmas on the Rocks.” Challenging dramas have included “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in ’86, “‘night, Mother” in ’95 and “The Laramie Project” in ’01.

“This organization has had two artistic leaders,” Ruggiero says. “We worked here together for a long time. We both have had a passion for great stories.”

With the pictures to prove it.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to remove information about the Dirty30 dance on July 29. That event has been canceled.