The Old Globe celebrates 90 years of theater, community, and new works in San Diego

Modeled after Shakespeare’s Old Globe in London, The Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park was built in 1935 as part of the California Pacific International Exposition, a fair to promote San Diego and support its economy during the Great Depression. 

At the exposition, the theater hosted 50-minute abridged versions of Shakespeare plays, and with the performance of Henry 6 last year, The Old Globe became only the eleventh theater in the country to produce every play in the Shakespeare canon.

As the late Darlene G. Davies noted ten years ago in Ranch & Coast’s comprehensive series marking the theater’s 80th anniversary, performance is “for the moment.” But the Globe has become a permanent fixture of San Diego, now comprising a three-theater complex known as the Conrad Prebys Theatre Center. As Davies also noted, the history of The Old Globe “has been an extraordinary journey,” and the events of the ten years since her series was published are no exception.

One of the biggest developments at the Globe over the last decade has been the launch of a community-based program called Arts Engagement. “This is something new to The Old Globe,” says Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director Barry Edelstein, who has been the theater’s artistic director since 2013. “Ten years ago, we got a multimillion-dollar grant to begin community-based work, and a decade later that has become central to both the Globe’s activities and identity.”

The creation of an arts engagement program is what brought Edelstein to San Diego from New York City, where he had been working for The Public Theater, producing the renowned Shakespeare in the Park. Not coincidentally, in 2016, shortly after Edelstein’s arrival, the Globe received a $5 million gift from Andrew Viterbi to create The Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director Fund. 

When Edelstein got to San Diego, he immediately set to work looking for ways the Globe could make an impact on the greater San Diego community. The result was a program called Globe for All, which is a professional production of a Shakespeare play that goes on tour around San Diego County each fall.

Globe for All is the theater’s flagship program, and began with a $1.8 million grant from the James Irvine Foundation in 2015. With that support, the theater launched a series of programs in coordination with the San Diego Public Library, San Diego Unified School District, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, among others.

“We have playwriting programs, acting workshops, and job training initiatives,” says Edelstein. “We have a program for veterans to learn skills working in the theater. We have programs for school children and others to train people in the technical aspects of theater.”

The Globe has one of the largest theater programs interacting with incarcerated populations in the country, and “we also work with senior centers, refugee organizations, at risk youth, and the homeless. Altogether, we serve some 30,000 San Diegans right in the communities where they live and work,” Edelstein adds. This fall, the company will be touring Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Another way the Globe has developed over the last decade involves its support for new plays, an effort boosted by a 2020 gift from Paula and Brian Powers, members of The Old Globe’s board of directors, who established the Powers New Work Fund.

With some 30 active commissions in the works, the Globe now has “one of the nation’s leading platforms for the development of new plays and productions by playwrights,” says Edelstein, noting that producing a new play is a complicated, labor intensive, time intensive, and resource intensive business audiences do not see. The Globe has sent seven shows to Broadway in the last ten years, and half a dozen other plays that premiered at the Globe went on to be produced both nationally and internationally.

Edelstein is also quick to mention others who have had a major impact on the theater over the last ten years. “What I loved about Darlene’s stories about the Globe is that she made sure to acknowledge not just the people in charge, but the many other colorful and extraordinary personalities who actually do the work on the ground,” he says.

Among those is Freedome Bradley-Ballentine, “a visionary,” as Edelstein refers to him, who specializes in community-based arts work. “He built the infrastructure,” Edelstein says. Bradley-Ballentine, whom Edelstein recruited from New York, returned to the East Coast after seven years and was succeeded by Edina Varner, whom Edelstein also cites as a key player, along with Karen Anne Daniels, director of programming, and Katherine Hara, associate director of arts engagement.

Edelstein also brought in Jesse Perez from The Juilliard School in New York to take over the graduate actor training program the Globe has operated with the University of San Diego for the last 35 years, now known as the Shiley Graduate Theater Program in honor of Darlene and Donald Shiley. “They are the professionals who specialize in this kind of community-based art, and their work has been essential,” says Edelstein.

Edelstein also mentions Timothy J. Shields, Audrey S. Geisel Managing Director, who he calls his “partner of the last nine years.” Shields, as managing director, played a key role in weathering the covid crisis for the Globe, as did some major philanthropy,
including a gift from Audrey Geisel, who left a significant bequest when she passed away in 2018.

“The theater was shut down for a year and a half beginning in 2020, but fortunately her gift provided the financial stability we needed to survive the pandemic,” Edelstein says. “And even while we were shut down, we pivoted our entire operation to digital platforms, making thousands of hours of content available online.”

As Davies noted, “It has been an extraordinary journey,” and on September 20, The Old Globe will be celebrating 90 years with a black-tie gala on the grounds of the theater complex with a special performance by Grammy and Emmy Award-winning songwriter/composer and Tony Award-nominated actor Christopher Jackson, who originated the role of George Washington in the hit Broadway sensation Hamilton. theoldglobe.org

Editor’s Note: Davies’ award-winning series on the history of The Old Globe can be found in its entirety here.