The Actor's Workshop was a theater company founded in San Francisco in the 1950s. It is considered by many to have been a seminal part of the modern theater movement in America. Its co-founders, Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, were professors at San Francisco State College. Their work rose to prominence on the American scene to such an extent that in 1965 the two were invited to initiate the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, which had just finished construction at New York's Lincoln Center. Without their leadership, the Actor's Workshop was not able to sustain its quality, and closed soon thereafter.