The Blue Room Theatre practices a deliberate approach to artistic education and production. We start with community outreach, dramaturgical analysis, and multiple readings of our mainstage shows. We provide opportunities for education to youth and adults in acting, design, stage management and critical analysis.

History

The Blue Room Theatre was started by a group of theatre artists who, inspired by the interstellar jazz music of Sun Ra and John Coltrane, called themselves the Cosmic Travel Agency. The five actors collaborated with jazz musicians and created children’s puppet shows they toured to libraries, cafes and northern California elementary schools.

The Founders: (from left to right) Tommy La Mere, Heather Carnduff, Daniel Kowta, Denver Latimer and Leesa Palmer

After performing their first full length play, an adaptation of an Italian folk tale called “Out in the World”, for packed houses at a local jazz club, they decided to find a permanent space in the spring of 1994. This turned out to be an abandoned Masonic Temple located above Collier’s Hardware in downtown Chico which they christened “The Blue Room.”

Historic Blue Room Theatre

Over the next several years the theatre forged an artistic identity comprised of original plays by company members (“Soup or Salad” “Backs to the Grotto”) and a lot of classic European modernist authors like Beckett, Brecht, Frisch, Cocteau, Ghelderhode, and Handke. Live music by nationally renowned, critically acclaimed rock artists such as the Mother Hips, Unwound, Make Up, and At the Drive In have graced the stage at the Blue Room and were greatly influential on the theatrical artistry in the first stage of the Blue Room’s aesthetic development. As CSUC theater students began to migrate through its doors, the theater company, now known as the Blue Room Theatre, began its famous late night programming schedule that has included original sketch comedy and the long running Twilight Zones Live. Founded by a group of literature majors, the theater over the years has hosted numerous annual festivals and events including Bloomsday (performed every June 16th to celebrate Joyce’s Ulysses), the Raymond Carver Festival, the Grand Guignol, and the Spring New Works Festival.

Throughout its history the Blue Room has remained a black box theater dedicated to serving the craft of the actor, observing theater’s modernist roots, and the incubation of new theater ideas.