It's supposed to be a tear-jerking death scene, but Robert Kelley isn't moved. As an actor drags himself across the stage at Lucie Stern Theater, struggling for breath, Kelley stops him. "You're going down the tubes! Let your voice get weaker as you go along," the director suggests. "And when you're on your deathbed kissing your mother's picture," he adds with a twinkle, "don't cough into her face."
Bearded, ponytailed, wearing jeans and flannel shirt, Kelley seems the essence of California cool. But his commitment to community theater, as founder and artistic director of Palo Alto's TheatreWorks, is hardly casual. Then again, TheatreWorks is no typical community theater. The award-winning repertory group, now in its 30th year, has staged 40 world premieres and made a name as one of the nation's most daring small professional troupes. It's doing well at the box office, too, drawing 95,000 Silicon Valley theatergoers a year and raising more than half of its $4.2 million budget through ticket sales. The rest comes from donors and government agencies.
If Kelley seems at home under Stern Theater's red-tiled roof, it's because he has spent much of his life here. As a kid growing up a few blocks from the theater, he immersed himself in its children's program, rehearsing fairy tales after school. "For me, working on this stage is almost like breathing," he says.
Kelley founded his company a year after he graduated from Stanford. He planned to teach English, but the City of Palo Alto made an irresistible proposal: could he write and direct an original show that would give vent to the angst of the younger generation? Kelley signed on and shook the town with a rock musical called Popcorn -- a satire on the generation gap in the thinly disguised community of Scraggly Tree. That was the start of his Youth Theater Workshop, the city-run predecessor to TheatreWorks.
Today, the group's productions range from Shakespeare to Sondheim to August Wilson's Fences,directed last winter by associate drama professor Harry Elam. Kelley himself has directed more than 100 of the plays. As artistic director, he supervises all the shows and is a sounding board for guest directors. It's not uncommon for him to work 70-hour weeks, especially close to show time. "TheatreWorks is his family," says Ev Shiro, Kelley's longtime partner, who lives with him in Menlo Park. "He approaches it with the commitment a parent would." His audiences can tell you it shows.
-- Theresa Johnston, '83
