ABSTRACT
What Herbert Blau and Jules Irving accomplished with The Actor’s Workshop is one of the great stories of the American theater. Founded on January 16, 1952, in a rundown loft on San Francisco’s Divisidero Street, The Workshop was the creation of Blau and Irving, two university professors, their wives, the actresses Beatrice Manley and Priscilla Pointer, and a core group of actors. Starting cautiously, refusing at fi rst to plan beyond the next show, the company expanded over the next thirteen years to around 150 people, producing over 100 plays often in two or three theaters simultaneously. Between 1952 and 1965, when Blau and Irving left San Francisco, The Workshop not only built an international reputation with its daring choice of plays and nontraditional productions, it also helped launch a movement of regional, or resident, companies that would change forever how Americans thought about and consumed theater.
