It started, as with most good ideas in art, in a bar. In 2014, a group of Salem theater artists and Willamette University profs repaired to a local pub to drown their sorrows after a student production on campus. They weren’t complaining about the performance. On the contrary, like most student productions from WU’s acclaimed theater department, it was a striking success. The problem they’d lamented for years was how few members of the Salem community bothered to cross the campus border to enjoy it. How, they wondered, could they entice non-academic audiences to breach that perennial town/gown divide — which vexes arts programs in many universities in Oregon and beyond? 

Drinks were ordered. Drinks were served. Drinks were imbibed. Repeat. Between each of those stages, ideas emerged, gradually becoming, with each new round of beverages, more and more expansive, taking on some of Oregon theater’s biggest issues.

“Why don’t we start a theater in the summer, market the hell out of it, and get people to come on campus?” mused actor/playwright Thomas Nabhan, who’d strode stages in Southern California and Oregon for decades.

“Yes! And focus on new play development,” chimed in his wife, the Drammy-winning actor and WU theater professor Susan Coromel. That role would be ideal for a creative environment like WU.

“But only produce Oregon and Northwest playwrights,” insisted her fellow prof Rachel Steck, who also suggested making admission donation-based, to encourage younger and lower-income patrons and audience members from underserved communities.

Over the course of that and subsequent meetings, the idea for a new Salem-based theater company emerged from the three veteran thespians, who’d been professionally involved in theater for decades, including with the recently defunct Salem Repertory Theater.

Instead of SRT’s typical four-to-five show season of contemporary and classic dramas, the new company would use professional actors, produce in the campus theater, and encourage Salem-area theater fans to venture onto Willamette’s leafy campus to see a show. And it would surmount other barriers: the impediments preventing Oregon theaters from staging plays made in Oregon. And for a name they chose Theatre 33 — after its home state, the thirty-third admitted to the union.

Over the next decade, T33 produced 44 new plays by 34 different playwrights, including 22 Oregonians, with 11 featuring Oregon/Northwest themes. The company, composed of lifelong theater professionals, academics, and artists, helps playwrights develop their new scripts, culminating in world-premiere full workshop productions that include fully professionally designed lights, sound, props, set, costumes, direction and blocking.  

This weekend, Theatre 33’s eleventh season, featuring works by Northwest playwrights, continues with a full workshop production of Portland playwright Sara Jean Accuardi’s Grow Learn Play at M. Lee Pelton Playhouse on the Willamette University campus. Next month includes a bonus production of a site-specific series of short plays by writers from Portland’s Northwest Theatre Workshop that we’ll tell you more about in a separate story. The 2024 season concludes with a full workshop production of Gone by Portland playwright Lolly Ward July 25-28 and August 1-4, and a pop-up production of Seattle playwright Yussef El Guindi’s Wife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance.  

Unique Approach

Each  year, T33’s play-reading committee (company artists, playwrights, and artistic director Coromel) reads the dozens of submitted scripts, looking for those in a Goldilocks developmental stage — not too raw, not too finished — that can most benefit from a full workshop production. 

“If two plays are very close in quality, [then] plays with content depicting Oregon/Northwest culture, themes, or history will get a bump,” explains Nabhan, who is T33’s executive director. “Playwright notoriety is not a factor. We choose plays based on quality. We only choose plays written by Oregon/Northwest playwrights – born in the region or currently living in the region.”

The company houses selected playwrights in Salem so they can attend rehearsals, work with company-provided dramaturgs in revisiting their scripts, and attend performances with audience talkbacks. That kind of broad and deep feedback is rare, even in playwright organizations, especially outside the East Coast. 

Full productions receive an impressive 60-hour rehearsal schedule, 30 hours for pop-up readings, with two days of technical rehearsals. They’re staged in WU’s smaller black box Putnam Studio, which can hold up to 60 audience members.

The pop-up staged readings, which happen in WU’s 60-seat Rogers Rehearsal Hall, contain some movement, with the actors seated on stools and using music stands for their scripts. They receive four rehearsals and two performances, with time for consulting with dramaturgs and rewriting between rehearsals. The mostly memorized shows are performed by professional actors with scripts in hand, to accommodate up-to-the minute changes based on audience and artist rehearsal feedback. 

T33’s budget has soared from $691 that first year to around $100,000 this year to over $150,000 planned for next year’s festival. Because admission is by donation, Nabhan says the company raises most of its funds through grants and sponsorship donations. Since 2021, when it became an official part of Willamette University, the company has received WU administrative support such as performance and rehearsal facilities, grant writing and accounting infrastructure. The company has also earned support from the city of Salem, and scored prestigious National Endowment for the Arts grants this year and in 2021.

“Over 70 percent of our budget goes to artist and staff salaries,” Nabhan says, and actor salaries have increased by 20 percent in the last few years. As actors themselves, company leaders have always insisted on paying actors reasonable wages (even though originally they could afford only token $50 stipends), and helps assure high performance standards. This summer’s festival is employing around 100 artists — actors, directors, dramaturgs, designers, playwrights, interns, etc. — and about 85 are Oregonians.

Oregon Originals

What immediately distinguishes Theatre 33 from other play development programs is its obsessions with originality — and Oregon. Oregon’s major theaters produce at most a handful of new plays each year, and fewer still by Oregonians. Nabhan says that as of last year, of 45 plays T33 has produced, 34 were written by Northwest  playwrights (22 from Oregon), while 13 of its plays have been set in the Northwest, of which nine featured Oregon culture, themes, or history.

T33’s development process is also rare and valuable. “There is no other workshop like this festival,” says playwright Evelyn Pine, whose Covid-inspired Secrets of Teaching Online (3X33) premiered in the 2022 season, in a testimonial. “What happens at Theatre 33 is a very special development process. The amount of rehearsal time is luxurious. The talented, engaged actors dig into the script. The director has the time to let them go deep and play. There’s a thoughtful dramaturg with whom you can toss around ideas and challenges. And there’s a creative technical team ready to use their skills to evoke the world of the play.” Other T33 playwrights echo those sentiments in the company’s list of testimonials.

Even play development festivals like the Portland area’s Fertile Ground mostly produce staged readings. It helped that two of T33’s founders happened to be scenic and lighting designers, says Coromel, and while dialogue will always be the foundation of playwriting, playwrights can benefit tremendously from close work with designers early in the creative process. Often writers will just assume that directors and designers will just figure out how to achieve certain effects, but T33’s designers can show them various ways to “realize what is in the playwright’s head about the space and physicality of their plays,” Coromel explains. They can help with technical aspects, present options, and give playwrights “a more specific understanding of how their play is working in terms of tempo and the three-dimensionality of sound and light.”

Even more crucial — and even rarer — is the involvement of dramaturgs, who are often playwrights themselves hired by the festival and assigned each to a production, where they not only provide the usual contextual and historical background and point out script weaknesses, weeks before rehearsals even begin, but also serve as intermediaries between writer and director, Coromel says. They ask playwrights to explain why they wrote their play, what’s important for audiences to take away from it, what dramatic ideas they’re playing with. 

“It’s not our job to fix the play,” Coromel says. “We want to make sure we’re doing the play they wrote, and if they’re asking, ‘how do I do this?’ always our intention is, ‘How do we make this work?’”

Dramaturgs’ involvement continues after rehearsals begin. For example, they can help the playwright figure out why some moments aren’t working. “The feedback playwrights get from dramaturgs is the most important part of the process,” Coromel continues. “The playwright is at the center of the company. In this first time in their play’s young state, they have to see what’s in their head on stage. Dramaturgs are the playwrights’ allies in that process.”

Expanding the Audience

The feedback continues from audience members in post-show talkbacks, with playwright, dramaturg and directors usually present. And, as hoped, T33 productions did indeed bring new audiences to campus. According to festival surveys, Nabhan says, over half T33’s audiences come from outside Salem city limits, a full 20 percent from more than 50 miles away. 

The donation-only pricing has produced a more demographically diverse audience than typically seen in Oregon theaters. Almost half report annual income of under $60,000, a third are 40 years old or younger, and 15 percent identify as people of color, Nabhan says. The board is committed to greater outreach to Salem’s large Latino community to bolster that audience.

Along with bringing new audiences to campus, the company has also achieved its other major goal: to nurture new Northwest plays for further development and eventual stagings. According to Nabhan, “of the 45 new plays we have produced, 17 have been premiered in 13 cities across the country,”  with 10 of those plays written by Oregonians and premiered by other companies in nine cities nationwide.

This Summer’s Slate

Coromel compares the setup for T33’s current full production, Accuardi’s Grow Learn Play, to William Inge’s famous Bus Stop, one of many stories that depict characters unexpectedly stuck together — here, in a day-care center where a child’s parents haven’t arrived to pick her up —and forced to learn how to get along. Its run concludes this weekend with performances Thursday through Sunday  at WU’s Pelton Theatre. 

“I wanted to explore how the simple rules we’re asked to follow as young children never stop applying to us,” Accuardi told Coromel in an interview. “Throughout this play, each character grows a bit and learns something. The play is also an examination of what it is to live authentically rather than playing a part and pretending to be someone you’re not. I was interested in the juxtaposition of adult themes against a childlike, cheerful, primary color saturated backdrop to show that there’s no point in life where we can’t all use a little growth, a little learning, and yes, a little more play.”

Accuardi also attested to the value of T33’s workshop process. “Theatre 33’s workshop process has been so incredibly valuable to me as I’ve figured out this play,” she told Coromel. “The first two weeks of rehearsal, where I was given the opportunity to discover things in the room with the help of my wonderful director, creative team, and cast, helped me shape the play with changes to the script and new pages but a playwright never knows if something really works or not until it’s in front of an audience. A two-week run is an absolute luxury for a playwright! There is so much to be learned from different audiences. I’ve already gained so much information about the play from the audience response in the first week of the run— each night the insights were a little bit different, and always enlightening. I can’t wait to see what next week’s audience response reveals about the play. All of that feedback will be so helpful as I dive into the next draft.”

The next pop-up staged reading, Redline by Seattle playwright Barbara Hume, is set in 1940s St. Louis, when Black migration is integrating neighborhoods and white residents are starting to leave — or put up fences. “It’s a story about a young man learning about the complicated world outside his family,” Coromel says. Portland playwright Kwik Jones serves as dramaturg for the June 29-30 reading.

This season’s final workshop production, Portland playwright Lolly Ward’s Gone, involves what Coromel calls a “funny but not exactly comic drama” involving a quartet of step-siblings who must divide the anticipated spoils from their parents’ combined estate. It runs July 25-28 and August 1-4.

The closing pop-up staged reading, Wife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance by  Seattle playwright Yussef El Guindi, features a Portland cast in a somewhat surreal-sounding story about a journalist probing a prominent Big Tech exec. 

Expansive Vision

For its second decade, Theatre 33 won’t rest content. Next season will see a shift to a regional festival model that will likely run three weeks, Nabhan says, with all six plays rehearsing simultaneously in June, opening in July, and running in rotating repertory. The three workshop productions will each receive two performances in WU’s larger, 99-seat black box Pelton Playhouse for a total of six performances each week, and the three pop-up staged readings will run once each for a total of three performances in the smaller black box Putnam Studio each week. That will mean switching out sets each night, but it also makes it much easier for visitors to come to Salem for a few days and see all the plays, as playgoers can do now with Ashland’s New Plays Festival.

“We also plan to offer adult creative/playwriting workshops each week,” Nabhan says. Those educational efforts would supplement T33’s existing playwriting classes for area high school students. “We also want to help develop the next generation of Oregon playwrights,” he continues. For four years, the company provided more than 60 full scholarships to rural and underserved high school students to take T33’s annual online 10-week Introduction to Playwriting course, taught by a professional playwright and accredited by the Salem-Keizer School District for a full semester of elective credit. To date, students from 34 high schools in 16 Oregon counties have taken the course.

Even further expansion impends after next season. “Our long-term vision is to put the festival in ‘festival’,” says Coromel, who chairs the university’s theater department. “[You can] come to campus, see a play in workshop performance, see a concert reading, take a masterclass with a playwright if you’re a writer, including young writers. So, come for four or five days and fill yourself with new plays, writing, and wineries. Willamette is a perfect environment for that. It has housing available for summer conferences, and the infrastructure to build out a more robust festival.”

T33’s ambitions might even take it beyond campus. “As we need more space in the future, we’d love to be able to expand, to add more festival components,” Nabhan says. The company hopes someday to stage a visual art display at Salem’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art throughout the Festival. Following up on previous partnerships with other Oregon institutions, including Northwest Theatre Workshop ( the upcoming Fragments and an earlier musical) and Oregon Symphony musicians, the company is looking to expand beyond its Salem origins and “having a collaborative relationship with another theater,” likely in the Portland region, Nabhan says. WU’s recent merger with Pacific Northwest College of Art might portend other Portland possibilities.

It’s a bold vision – but then so was the original, born in a barroom. Theatre 33 has already outstripped its founders’ headiest imaginings, and promises an even more intoxicating future for homegrown Oregon theater.

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• Theatre 33’s workshop production of Grow Learn Play by Sara Jean Accuardi continues June 27-30 at Willamette University’s Pelton Theatre.
• The staged pop-up reading of Red Line by Barbara Hume runs June 29 at Capitol Auto Group’s Outdoor Pavillion, and June 30 at Pelton Theatre.
• The workshop production of Gone by Lolly Ward runs July 25-28 and August 1-4 at Pelton Theatre.
• Northwest Theatre Workshop’s Fragments runs July 27 and 28 at Hopewell Hub. Stay tuned for ArtsWatch’s preview.
• The staged pop-up reading of Wife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance by Yussef El Guindi runs August 3-4 at WU’s Rogers Rehearsal Hall.