As a guest, you can shop our event listings and read reviews, but you must join Goldstar to use all of its features, like buying tickets, writing reviews, viewing member profiles and more.
Born in a storefront on College Avenue, Berkeley Rep has moved to the forefront of American theatre—and is still telling unforgettable stories. Founded in 1968 by Michael Leibert, the Theatre quickly earned respect for presenting the finest plays with top-flight actors. In 1980, with the support of the local community, Berkeley Rep built the 400-seat Thrust Stage where its reputation steadily g … Morerew over the next two decades. It gained renown for an adventurous combination of work, presenting important new dramatic voices alongside refreshing adaptations of seldom-seen classics. In recognition of its place on the national stage, Berkeley Rep was honored with the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 1997. The company celebrated by unveiling a new 600-seat proscenium stage in 2001, the state-of-the-art Roda Theatre. It also opened the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, a permanent home for its long tradition of outreach and education programs. The addition of these two buildings transformed a single stage into a vital and versatile performing arts complex, the linchpin of a bustling Downtown Arts District which has helped revitalize Berkeley. In four decades, four million people have enjoyed more than 300 shows at Berkeley Rep, including 50 world premieres. The Theatre now welcomes an annual audience of 180,000, serves 20,000 students and hosts dozens of community groups, thanks to 1,000 volunteers and more than 400 artists, artisans and administrators. In the last three years, Berkeley Rep has helped send five hit shows to New York: Bridge & Tunnel, Brundibar, Eurydice, Passing Strange and Taking Over.
Berkeley Repertory Theatre seeks to set a national standard for ambitious programming, engagement with its audiences and leadership within the community in which it resides. We endeavor to create a diverse body of work that expresses a rigorous, embracing aesthetic and reflects the highest artistic standards, and seek to maintain an environment in which talented artists can do their best work. We strive to engage our audiences in an ongoing dialogue of ideas, and encourage lifelong learning as a core community value. Through productions, outreach and education, Berkeley Rep aspires to use theatre as a means to challenge, thrill and galvanize what is best in the human spirit. Less
Come see where the Bay Area's theatre pros go to play on their night off. Now in its 16th season, PlayGround presents staged readings of six original short plays written by top Bay Area emerging playwrights, inspired by a single topic and performed by leading local directors and actors. Learn more...
Last year, Carrie Fisher was a sold-out sensation at Berkeley Rep with her hilarious solo show, Wishful Drinking. Since then, it's enjoyed a national tour and become a New York Times bestseller. Now she's back at Berkeley Rep -- before taking the show to Broadway. Learn more...
Actor Delroy Lindo returns to the play which earned him a Tony Award nomination, August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, but this time as the director. Haunted by seven years on a chain gang, Herald Loomis appears in Pittsburgh to reunite his family. Surrounded by the vibrant tenants of a black boarding house, he fights for his soul and his song in the dawning days of a century without slavery. Learn more...
Carrie Fisher, the child of two Hollywood stars (Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher), offers a hilariously sobering look at her life. It's an incredible tale, from being cast as Princess Leia in Star Wars at the age of 19, to having Elizabeth Taylor as a stepmother, to marrying (and divorcing) Paul Simon, to having the father of her daughter leave her for a man. The L.A. Times calls Wishful Drinking a "Beverly Hills yard sale of juicy anecdotes." Learn more...
Tony Award-winning director Mary Zimmerman returns to Berkeley Rep for the West Coast premiere of Argonautika. This time, Zimmerman joins Jason on his ancient quest for the Golden Fleece--an epic journey of love and loss, hubris and honor, danger and adventure. Argonautika shows us that love is the bane of all mankind--and yet it's all that we know of heaven on earth. Learn more...
Inspired by the vivid world of the Victorian music-hall, this production of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist uses the novel's original language to dramatize one of the most deeply felt stories ever written about childhood. A cast of unforgettable characters brings the underworld of 19th-century London to thrilling life. By turns comic and tragic, musical and dramatic, Twist was a runaway success in London. Learn more...
When he refuses to attend the Million Man March, an African-American professor finds his personal and professional lives thrown into turmoil. Two exceptional actors embody three generations in this powerful new play from Tanya Barfield. Blue Door is a searing examination of family and identity, directed by Delroy Lindo (Get Shorty, Malcolm X). Learn more...
To The Lighthouse, a world-premiere adaptation of Virginia Woolf's landmark novel, bring Woolf's incandescent characters to life on stage. Here, a couple lives, loves and endures; children play, fight and grow; and a painter struggles to capture the transient beauty of daily life. Learn more...
Saturday January 20, 2007 / 2:00pm: Matinee Series
Full Price:
$172.00 - $228.00
Our Price:
$86.00 - $114.00*
The Tony Award-winning Berkeley Repertory Theatre presents a subscription series featuring four extraordinary shows from its 2007 season. Spend four Saturdays enjoying the delights of live professional theatre produced by one of the nation's most respected, most adventurous companies. Purchase a subscription package and you will see The Pillowman, To The Lighthouse, The Blue Door, and Oliver Twist! Learn more...
Comic hilarity abounds as two silent film clowns fall off the screen to create a surreal world of venomous ventriloquists and belligerent bowlers. In the tradition of Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and Samuel Beckett, all wear bowlers brims with sheer entertainment as these two masterful physical comedians tickle your funny bone and move you to tears. Learn more...
The Tony Award-winning Berkeley Repertory Theatre presents a subscription series featuring six extraordinary shows from its 2006/07 season. Spend six Friday evenings enjoying the delights of live professional theatre produced by one of the nation's most respected, most adventurous companies. Purchase a subscription package and you will see: Passing Strange, All Wear Bowlers, The Pillowman, To the Lighthouse, The Blue Door and Oliver Twist. Learn more...
A religious war ravages the civilized world, killing soldiers and civilians alike. Plodding along in its wake, an itinerant peddler shadows the destruction and sells supplies to whichever side will grease her palm. Bertolt Brecht penned his anti-war epic as the Nazi war machine rolled through Poland, and in David Hare's vigorous translation, its prescient lessons and surprising humor remain relevant today. Learn more...
Internationally known as "the human paper doll," Ennio makes the art of origami into theatrical magic. Don't miss the original quick-change artist as he races through fifty life-size costumes in seventy minutes, lampooning politicians, celebrities and historical figures in a presentation that's part Commedia Dell'Arte, part Walt Disney -- and fun for all ages. Bring your friends, bring your kids -- bring your mother-in-law if you must -- but don't miss this limited-engagement event, this summer at Berkeley Rep. Learn more...
The incomparable Rita Moreno returns to Berkeley Rep for a role as iconic as she is: Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. This is your chance to witness an extraordinary performance from one of the few artists to win the Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy! Tennessee Williams' beloved "memory play" is an invitation to see one of the great actresses of our time in the intimate, 400-seat Thrust Stage. Ms. Moreno is joined by a supremely talented cast and directed by Berkeley Rep's Obie Award-winning associate artistic director, Les Waters. Learn more...
This savagely funny comedy about a love affair between a man and his money gets a dazzling new production at Berkeley Rep. Greed is good if you're Harpagon, who has beggared his family to safeguard his hefty stash of cash. His frustrated children think differently, however, and now they must outsmart the old man to get the money they need to marry the mates they want. Can Harpagon hold onto his hoard (and get himself a hot young bride in the bargain), or will his offspring loosen his stranglehold on the family fortune? Learn more...
Riding out of the pages of pulp fiction, it's Zorro--like you've never seen him before. Following their 2002 hit Culture Clash in AmeriCCa, the missionaries of mayhem called Culture Clash return to Berkeley Rep with the world premiere of their Zorro in Hell. The trio takes on Zorro's legend to explore homeland security in the Wild West--when Anglo-Americans struggled with Mexican immigration, Indian gambling and a governor born on foreign soil. At long last, it's a look behind the mask of a mainstream icon invented by an Irish American...Culture Clash style. Learn more...
Berkeley Rep is proud to present Brundibar, a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between two artistic giants: Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak. Not only is Kushner the acclaimed author of Angels in America and Homebody/Kabul, he wrote the brilliant libretto for Caroline, or Change--now he's penned a new libretto for this remarkable musical fable. Sendak's singular style is famous from books such as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen--don't miss his spectacular designs for this production. Learn more...
In Finn in the Underworld, the mystery begins when Gwen and Rhoda must clean out their dead father's house. Little remains, other than the grandfather clock, until they literally bring the house's ghosts to life. That's when Gwen's son, Finn, encounters Carver, a neighbor who holds the key to the family's secrets. Learn more...
Berkeley Repertory Theatre presents Pulitzer Prize-Winner Thornton Wilder's Our Town. One of the most-beloved of American plays, Our Town tells the bittersweet stories of the residents of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. Like life itself, the story moves from the carefree to the profound: characters grow up, fall in love, get married, bear children and--in the heart-rending final act--encounter untimely death. Learn more...
Enjoy an unforgettable summer evening at Berkeley Rep with Mike Daisey, who bounded in last season with 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com and now returns with a dazzling new tale about his misadventures as an exchange student in London. Learn more...
Berkeley Repertory Theatre is proud to stage the world premiere of The People's Temple, a theatrical exploration of the roots, the rise and the tragic demise in Jonestown, Guyana of the movement led by the Reverend Jim Jones. The show -- which emphasizes moving forward rather than looking back -- is directed by Leigh Fondakowski, best known for her work on The Laramie Project, a groundbreaking play that received its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Rep in 2001. Learn more...
Broadway veteran and OBIE Award-winner Kathleen Chalfant partners with John Doman of HBO's The Wire for an exquisite portrayal of desire and infidelity. "Intelligent, powerful, and gripping," raves the Times of London. In laying bare our most intimate institution, says London's The Guardian, the play "brings fresh life" to a timeless tale of love and commitment. Learn more...
PlayGround's 2005 Benefit & Awards Night is a special tribute to the playwrights of PlayGround, featuring performances of six original short plays by leading local and nationally-recognized playwrights. Learn more...
For Better or Worse has all the components of classic comedy: an unhinged husband, his wife, her lover, a constipated brat and a military contract for unbreakable chamber pots. In this world premiere production, comic genius Geoff Hoyle outdoes the outrageous as a hapless husband in the midst of a matrimonial hurricane. Don't miss "one of the great and unique performers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle) as he helps himself to a dose of inspired lunacy. Learn more...
Fetes de la Nuit is a racy collage that expresses the beauty and complexity of love. It mingles drama, dance and music--including Edith Piaf, great arias from opera, hip hop and French pop music--into a sensual and exuberant celebration of life. Learn more...
The acclaimed Berkeley Repertory Theatre presents the West Coast Premiere of Polk County, a blues musical by Zora Neale Hurston, one of American's first great black female writers and a towering figure of the Harlem Renaissance. With a rich cast of characters and a live band performing dozens of authentic early blues songs, Polk County is a musical guaranteed to lift the spirits! Learn more...
The Berkeley Repertory Theatre presents Eurydice, the classic story of Orpheus and Eurydice, reimagined from Eurydice's point of view with contemporary characters, on the Thrust Stage. Learn more...
See the West Coast premiere of Tony Award winning writer/director Mary Zimmerman's The Secret in the Wings, a vivid staging of five fairy tales including "Beauty and the Beast," retold in an imaginative and colorful style for adult audiences. Learn more...
Berkeley Rep presents Broadway legend Rita Moreno as opera diva Maria Callas in Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning play. Don't miss this "masterful and magnificent" production! Learn more...
Featuring characters such as a sympathetic werewolf, a vampire and an Egyptian mummy, The Mystery of Irma Vep is a comic send-up of Victorian melodrama, Gothic romance and classic horror films. Learn more...
Mother's Against, part of David Edgar's acclaimed two-play cycle Continental Divide, from Berkeley Rep. Learn more...
Map and Directions
Berkeley Repertory Theatre is located at 2025 Addison Street, near the intersection of Addison and Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley.
For directions and parking information:
http://www.berkeleyrep.org/planyourvisit/index.asp
Handicap Information
Handicap seating may be available.
Please contact us before buying tickets to make arrangements.
