Ukiah Players Theatre

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The Ukiah Players Theatre is a nonprofit theater in Ukiah, California in residence at the Ukiah Playhouse.

The UPT was founded in 1977 by a group of private theater artists. This same year Mendocino County, California saw the founding of two other theatre companies: the Willits Community Theatre and the Mendocino Performing Arts Company (now known as the Mendocino Theatre Company. All three of these community theatres were founded by members of the "Back to the Land" movement (idealistic city dwellers who moved to rural areas in Northern California to create new utopian societies during the 1970s). WCT and MTC remained simple theatres, but UPT took a different route: A significant focus on new works (New American Comedy Festival for new plays, still happening every two years), and a major emphasis on the theater-arts as a tool for community sharing and re-imagining (teen monologue workshops, A More Perfect Union, UPRooted/RERooted, the Good War Project, the Vagina Monologues, Of All Places, PlaceMeant Project).

In 1980 the Ukiah Playhouse was built and the theater has been in residence there since then. In 1988 the theater was expanded to include a gift shop, storage, box office and dressing rooms to the already 138 seat facility. Since its formation in 1977, the Ukiah Players Theatre has presented hundreds of stage plays and musical productions.

UPT and one of the founders, Kate Magruder, former Artistic Director, now Community Artist in Residence, were recognized by the California Assembly Resolution in 2003 for civic leadership work in Ukiah.

UPT is presently working on documentary stories about people's personal experience with living in Mendocino County in the PlaceMeant Project. See the bibliography below.

[edit] Bibliography

Eco-Theatre, USA: The Grassroots Is Greener Downing Cless TDR (1988-), Vol. 40, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 79-102doi:10.2307/1146531 (an article in this publication about UPT's production of "upRooted" in 1991 -an original story-based theatre piece about forest issues in Mendocino County)

New Creative Community: the Art of Cultural Development by Arlene Goldbard. Published by New Village Press, 2006, Pages 73-74 (profile about UPT's "PlaceMeant Project: Stories of Why Where Matters")