The mission of Eastenders Repertory Company is to provide a collaborative, mentoring environment for theatre artists to produce both original and established works in repertory and to develop educational programs in theatre arts.

About ERC
Eastenders Repertory Company is held together by a strong membership of artists who collectively write, direct, act, design, manage, produce and generally build theatre from the ground up. Our strength comes from self-mentoring. We teach each other, learn from each other and enthusiastically support each other in our endeavors to maintain artistic integrity; we strive to improve our community service opportunities and develop new, diverse and innovative art. The company currently has enroled 11 active members. Our Board of Directors is comprised of four professionals, three ex officio members and one company artist representative. The ERC Management team is made up of our Founding Artistic Director, Charles E. Polly, the Finance Director, Suzan A Kendall, and the Outreach Director, Jennifer Daly.

In 1990 core founding members of ERC produced two one-act plays at Studio Eremos, thus inaugurating our journey together as a repertory theatre company. ERC became a California non-profit corporation in late 1996, and produced its first full season of plays in 1997. In May 2001 Eastenders Repertory Company successfully complied with the advanced ruling period requirements of the IRS and was awarded permanent non-profit status as a 501(c)(3) organization. We continue to premiere new works, to reinterpret classic works and to develop educational programs in theatre arts.

Innovative Professional Productions
The production record of ERC includes 81 award-winning works of full-length and one-act plays. In the past 18 years we have performed before approximately 12,750 people in intimate 50-150 seat theatres.

One-Act Festivals
In 1999 board and membership recommitted to the desire to nurture the talents of our own repertory acting ensemble. We began to produce in true repertory with the launching of an annual one-act play festival. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF ONE-ACTS at Traveling Jewish Theatre surpassed our goal of exposing a new audience to a few of the seminal short works of the 20th century’s most influential playwrights. We also broke all previous ERC box office records! Each of our one-act festivals has featured a different theme (from geographic to stylistic); we have explored European playwrights (2000), styles of comedy (2001), the short plays of Tennessee Williams (2002), political theatre (2004), the theme of gender and sexuality (2006) and queer theatre (2009). The festivals provide an opportunity to present some of the lesser known short pieces from the pantheon of dramatists, including Synge, Garcia Lorca, Brecht, Strindberg, Shaw, Ionesco, Beckett, Williams and Kushner. Always performed in rotating repertory with a core troupe of actors, the festivals are now a key component of our programming, and serve the purpose of training new actors in and exposing audiences to the repertory model. We have produced the festivals at a variety of venues, including the Eureka Theatre where we have been a company in residence since 2001. Our Seventh Annual 2009 Festival was also our first ever co-production, with Theatre Rhinoceros.

Original Works
Founding Artistic Director Charles E. Polly’s Twyla’s Boy, the first part of his Twyla Trilogy of memory plays about growing up as a gay man in Appalachia, was one of the first pieces performed by the ensemble that was to grow into our company. In 1998 Eastenders made a great leap into a larger arena with the premiere production of the second part of the trilogy, Twyla’s Story, at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. In 2000 we premiered June Bug Music, the trilogy’s third and final installment, also at the Magic Theatre. Polly has since become our playwright-in-residence, and in 2005 we featured his full length A Knight’s Escape, along with WWJD? by San Jose-based playwright Scott Munson at the Ashby Stage. In 2002 Eastenders embarked on a thrilling and ongoing experiment pairing the Tennessee Williams one-act The Long Goodbye with a collection of new short pieces written in response to the work of that great American playwright. The company revisted this model in 2006 with PINTERESQUE, this time pairing Harold Pinter’s The Lover with the world premieres of six short plays inspired by the master playwright’s work.

Reinterpretations of Established Playwrights
Our first full season of plays in 1997 opened with the Bay Area premiere of one of Tennessee Williams’ last full length plays, Something Cloudy, Something Clear (and thus began the company’s ongoing love affair with the playwright); the year continued with a run of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. During Season 2003 Eastenders presented two full-length plays in repertory: the local premieres of the Obie-award winning serio-comedy entitled [sic] by Melissa James Gibson and the hilarious Wonder of the World by David Lindsay-Abaire. We were fortunate enough to engage both N.Y. writers in an intriguing joint interview for TBA Magazine. Season 2004 opened with a critically well-received production of Three Hotels and Four Monologues by Jon Robin Baitz at the Thick House in San Francisco, an intimate space well-suited for smaller-scaled productions. In the spring of 2007, Eastenders produced the Bay Area premiere of FEAR AND MISERY OF THE THIRD REICH by Bertolt Brecht, a masterful and wrenching documentary portrait of everyday life under the Nazis. This critically praised production appeared on both sides of the Bay – at Traveling Jewish in San Francisco and at the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay (“JCCEB”) in Berkeley. This collaboration with the JCCEB went so well that Eastenders was invited back in 2008 where we mounted a successful run of 3 Vaněk Plays by human rights champion and former Czech Republic President Václav Havel. In the fall of 2008, our core performers shone in a critically-lauded production of Bryony Lavery’s powerful drama Frozen.

Community Service/Educational Programs
As theatre economics force ticket prices up and force mainstream companies to curtail their educational programs, theatre becomes inaccessible to younger and less affluent audiences. Since our formation ERC has done outreach to marginalized groups through our community service/educational programs. We dedicated one performance per week of our first production in 1990 to audiences from shelters and low-income housing and arranged transportation from many San Francisco areas. ERC participated in the 1995 7th AIDS Theatre Festival at the Moscone Convention Center which focused on the importance of theatre in AIDS education. In 1998 at Willard Middle School in Berkeley, California, ERC worked to help aspiring actors and directors realize quick and efficient techniques of getting a play from page to stage, exploring the processes of casting, designing, directing and producing. We have actively recruited interns from local middle and high schools to participate in our professional productions. We routinely reserve a number of free tickets to our productions for Shanti Project, Seniors Who Love Theatre and other low-income attendees and make a policy of never turning an attendee away from the door. In 2007 we toured scenes from our Brecht production free to the public to local library branches in San Francisco, Mills College and Palo Alto High School and the JCCEB. In 2008 we offered a free performance of Unveiling by Václav Havel (one of the plays from 3 Vaněk Plays) to a performance studies class at San Francisco State University, Free excerpts of PRIDE OPEN were also offered throughout the Bay Area.

Since 2000, Eastenders members have partnered with local actor/writer/ director Thomas Lynch in the presentation of participatory murder mysteries, free events sponsored by the Claremont Branch of the Oakland Public Library for the Elmwood community. ERC has been an active supporter of The Lemonade Fund, a granting organization for the past 15 years for critically ill theatre workers, through collections at our performances and through participation in TBA’s Shakespeare Marathon. ERC members have proudly participated as a team in AIDSWalk every year since 2001, and the company is committed to AIDSWalk as an annual event for our organization. ERC is a KQED and KTEH-sponsoring organization and our members have volunteered during past pledge drives. Eastenders also regularly participates in events with our local theatre community, including Theatre Bay Area’s annual General Auditions, Expo Memberfest, the Annual Conference and ACT’s MFA Showcase.

Play Development
ERC members believe in the value of workshops, staged readings, and play development. We consider these activities to be the core of our mission. Without the ability to nurture artists and incubate new work, theatres exist merely as museums for the works of the past. Plays fully developed and staged by ERC include new works by award-winning Bay Area playwrights Charles E. Polly and Dean Backus, East Bay poet Mary Milton, San Jose playwright Scott Munson and Seattle playwright Bret Fetzer. As part its ongoing commitment to showcase new playwrights, our productions of TENN IN 2002! and PINTERESQUE featured works by emerging writers. Charles E. Polly, Eastenders’ Founder and Playwright-in-Residence, has continued to conduct an ongoing educational workshop for new writers which he calls New Voices. Participants have been given showcases in 2002, 2003 and 2007 as part of our mission of mentorship. Eastenders is also busy forging ties with established Bay Area playwrights, such as Scott Munson, Joe Besecker, Christine U’Ren and Trevor Allen and provided opportunities for these playwrights to hear their works-in-progress hot off the presses and obtain positive, constructive feedback.

This past spring ERC took a major leap with PRIDE OPEN, an ensemble-created story-telling project exploring our contemporary conceptions of sexual identity, combining music, dance and digital stories from the LGBT youth community. Excerpts from PRIDE OPEN traveled to a variety of venues around the greater Bay Area, including the San Francisco Main Library and other branch libraries, the LGBT Community Center and San Francisco State University. These free “workshop” performances included talkbacks with audiences to solicit responses to the work, and this feedback helped shape the final collective text.

Workshops
ERC has conducted workshops in stage combat, Shakespeare and masters acting classes for high school artists; produced a video on earthquake preparedness for viewing in Bay Area School Districts; and internally offered audition, directing and scene study workshops. Joy Carlin, well-respected Bay Area actress and director, participated in our scene study workshop and offered our actors professional and enlightening direction. In early 2000 Eastenders conducted a Scene Study/ Director Workshop, exploring the concept of combining mentoring for actors and directors. In fall 2005 we revisited our Directing Workshop in a new format for an intimate group selected from membership; this workshop also proved excellent outreach to the young actors in the community who served as guinea pigs for the directing participants. Last year, Artistic Director Evans conducted a 2-day Director’s intensive focused on working with new plays and novice playwrights. One participant, Alice Shikina, then Artistic Director of the BOA Festival, was impressed enough to ask us to hold a similar workshop for her BOA Directors prior to the 2008 BOA Festival.

Annually since 1996 ERC’s Artistic Staff Susan E. Evans and Charles E. Polly have conducted Audition Workshops for members and the local acting community. Local casting directors Amy Potozkin (Berkeley Repertory Theatre), Meryl Shaw (ACT), Annie Stuart (Marin Theatre Company), Leslie Martinson (TheatreWorks) and, Greg Hubbard (ACT), along with Nancy Carlin (local actor/director) and Patrick Dooley (Artistic Director, Shotgun Players) have all served as auditors of the final sessions of these ongoing Audition Workshops and provided useful critiques, feedback and encouragement. These workshops provide performers with a unique opportunity to engage in one-on-one interactions with casting directors – in turn, our local casting directors enjoy the rare experience of explaining their decision-making process. As a direct result of our Audition Workshops participants have been asked to audition for roles at major houses, including TheatreWorks and ACT, and four participating actors have landed jobs with local companies (Berkeley Repertory Theatre, TheatreWorks, New Conservatory Theatre and Shakespeare at Stinson).

In an effort to educate our membership and increase our exposure to theatre literature – from the Greeks to just off-Broadway – ERC hosts a drop-in playreading series to read plays in an informal, friendly environment. These evenings attract theatre professionals who want to brush up their skills and network with their peers, keep our membership informed and active and provide exposure to theatre novices. We continue to mine opportunities to mentor our members in all areas of theatre. In our future lie many more workshops geared specifically for schools and an abundance of opportunities in developing and producing original theatre, new approaches to artistic realization and the joy of serving a wonderfully diverse community.