News And Blogs

“Los Angeles is a city where, in many ways, it is hard to connect with other human beings,” said Center Theatre Group Director of Social Strategy, Innovation and Impact Leslie Johnson.

Creating Connection Through Community Conversations

When playwright and MacArthur “Genius” Luis Alfaro was a child, his mother would bring him to shows at the Ahmanson Theatre and Mark Taper Forum—but she would wait in the parking lot of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power while he sat in the audience, enraptured. Alfaro became an usher in 1979 and eventually became part of Center Th...

The Local Theatre Movement

When we first developed our Boyle Heights programming three years ago, we laid what would become the foundations of our work at a community engagement strategies brainstorming session. One of the many lists we made was titled “Barriers of Participation,” alongside another list of solutions for said barriers. Here’s what we’ve learned about...

Location, Location, Location!

When we first developed our Boyle Heights programming three years ago, we laid what would become the foundation of our work at a community engagement strategies brainstorming session. One of the many lists we made was titled “Barriers of Participation,” alongside another list of solutions for said barriers. One of the first items we listed was...

Making Sure No One Gets Lost in Translation

We offer all of our free community workshops in and around The Shop, Center Theatre Group’s costume and prop shop in Boyle Heights, in Spanish and English. At any given workshop we host, at least three quarters of the participants are Spanish-only speakers, and almost everyone is bilingual.

Teaching Artist and Prop Master Extraordinaire Merrianne Nedreberg

Center Theatre Group has a great reputation and is a brand recognized by the theatre community and by many Angelenos, but for most people in Boyle Heights, it’s just three words they haven’t heard of before. An important part of my job as Community Liaison for Center Theatre Group is to provide a face for the organization and to create a person...

Why You Need a Community Liaison

Every time I meet a parent, without fail, I’m asked about programs for their children. It’s wonderful that parents and caretakers want their children to have access to more resources, but I remind them that many of our programs are for adults. Parents and caretakers work hard and deserve their own time to be creative, to socialize, to learn a n...

Designing an Experience for Parents

I’ve come to know that community encompasses more than just a group of people from a specific neighborhood, ethnicity, or age, and so, I’ve developed three “lenses” that I look through as I design community programs: community, Center Theatre Group, and artists. Each lens allows me to see who and what is represented or what spaces are...

The Boyle Heights Chronicles: Use More Lenses, Find More Intersections

We are halfway through the third year of programs in and around Boyle Heights as part of Center Theatre Group’s The Shop initiative and community programs, and each day I still learn something new, I meet someone who has never been to the theatre, and I find myself in awe of the creativity unleashed at a workshop, play reading, or costume de...

What I've Learned Three Years In

Just days after Christmas, if you happened to stroll past a nondescript, dark-curtained storefront—the one just beyond the costume shop and the tax preparer along West Whittier Boulevard—most likely, you wouldn’t have looked twice. You wouldn’t have known that something magical was at work; that while a play was being made, a bridge wa...

Down the Rabbit Hole with "Through the Looking Glass"

Poets and playwrights Jerry Quickley and reg e gaines return to the Douglas on February 8, 2016 with Through the Looking Glass, a collaboration with community members from Leimert Park and Montebello that explores their lives and neighborhoods....

Jerry Quickley and reg e gaines Return to the Douglas