News And Blogs

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"