Behind the curtain with TheatreWorks Artistic Director Giovanna Sardelli

It s a busy time at Shasta Street in Redwood City where TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is based Actors rehearse for the upcoming world premiere of a new musical while the Silicon Valley theater company grapples with a latest funding loss the National Endowment for the Arts has withdrawn a grant to fund its workshop for new and established Bay Area writers Managing it all behind the scenes is Artistic Director Giovanna Sardelli who served as the theater company s director of new works for nearly a decade before taking on the artistic director role in We in recent weeks interviewed her to learn more Responses have been edited for length and clarity Q Tell me more about your journey to this role You used to work in a magic show A Yes I was born and raised in Las Vegas so I had selected strange job opportunities I was a magician s assistant for the Pendragons after I knew that I was not going to pursue being an actor but I didn t know what else to do I took the job for a year and perfected looking surprised In the back of my head I was like What do I want to do with my life Who will I be And then I got very lucky that the path of directing was laid out for me Q I understand you re directing an exciting new show Tell me about it A It s a world premiere musical based on the play by Ed Grazcyk Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean It s a lovely story of this group of friends who grew up in a tiny town in Texas where nothing happens except that James Dean s last movie was filmed in the next town over and one of them got to be an extra On the th anniversary of James Dean s death the disciples of James Dean are reuniting in this tiny town It s about this group of friends the bravery of showing up to your old home as your new self exposed family love forgiveness and the power of truth to change your life It s just beautiful and the music is extraordinary It s by Dan Gillespie Sells Shakina the lyricist and one of the leads in the show is a trans activist and artist with whom I ve been working for well over a decade Back in when the show was first done the reveal of the trans character was kind of a salacious thing In ours there s no reveal you know who Shakina is By removing that it put the heart of the play back where it should be which is really on the women who were left behind in this little town TheatreWorks Silicon Valley artistic director Giovanna Sardelli at TheatreWorks headquarters in Redwood City Calif on May Dai Sugano Bay Area News Group Q So what does a typical day look like for you A I usually wake up and try to make sure I take care of myself because the minute I turn on my phone or check an email I m working There s the business of running the theater day-to-day Basically from to I m doing administrative things reading plays reaching out to playwrights trying to figure out what s next having whatever meetings I need to to keep the machine operating and doing fundraising calls Then I try to stop and eat lunch because at p m I go into rehearsal until Then I go home and sometimes I have to work another hour or hour and a half Sometimes I m just so tired I sit on the couch and stare and then get up to do it again the next day Q I understand TheatreWorks has had a few financial challenges in latest years What s it like keeping a theater company alive in Silicon Valley in A TheatreWorks is doing relatively well We had a horrible time coming out of the pandemic it was complex for the entire industry And in fact every day theaters continue to close But our group really exhibited up with our Save TheatreWorks Now campaign We raised enough money and we ve been working hard to stabilize the company Now we can triumphantly say we are as precarious as any theater has ever been as a not-for-profit TheatreWorks Silicon Valley artistic director Giovanna Sardelli and Pulitzer Prize finalist playwright Rajiv Joseph have formed a deep bond through their multiple collaborations I know his rhythms and how he crafts stories she says Kevin Berne TheatreWorks Silicon Valley Then the NEA pulled funding To start our leadership doesn t fund the arts the way they re funded in other countries After theaters and other arts organizations had gone through the trouble of doing all the paperwork and the whole budgeting process to have that funding removed was a slap in the face The prerogative of the authorities is that they can change their mission but the decent thing to do is to change it going forward not retroactively What people don t realize is that for our organization and every organization that lost that funding they re also losing that funding in the future because to receive any funding from the establishment you have to sign a document saying that you will not do work that focuses diversity inclusion and equity sign a document saying We will be homogenous inequitable and exclusionary It s absurd right It means we have to work harder We like to say we re locally grown and nationally known and we have robust assistance from our public The thing about Silicon Valley though is that even though we all know we re surrounded by billions of dollars it doesn t find its way into the neighborhood and into the arts in as robust a way as you would think An NEA statistic says that more arts organizations closed in this area than others during and after COVID Related Articles Berkeley writer pens poems on motherhood wildfires friendship and loss Q A Author Bonnie Tsui on memoir muscle and movement Q A Spring cooking with SF Greens chef Katie Reicher Q A Literary BFFs Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar take on the Bay Area Q Why do you think it is so central to have a thriving local theater company in Silicon Valley A The number of people who say the theater saved them There is something about theater It s ancient It s a secular church It is coming together to share a space and share a story There are studies on how it regulates your heartbeat and how it releases serotonin In terms of activities we can also shape what conversations we have as a society We re constantly asking What are we providing Sometimes the answer is respite or bliss Or think about how much history you ve learned through movies and plays and not in school Theater and art have dependably had a way of giving back lost histories I m embarrassed I learned about redlining through A Raisin in the Sun not in school but through a play I learned about the Oklahoma riots even though my family is from Oklahoma from Marvel TV In Silicon Valley so a great number of of our artists actors writers and directors go on to populate Apple TV Netflix or Hulu You can take a direct line and say We are the de facto R D wing of every movie theater You learn the craft here in a way that you can t learn it in other places Giovanna Sardelli City of residence Menlo Park CA and Las Vegas NV Schooling BA University of Nevada Las Vegas MFA Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Acting Venture New York University Age fun facts I was a magician s assistant in a Vegas magic show before becoming a director I played Nurse Claire on the soap opera Another World for several years Karate was my passion for multiple years I received my nd degree black belt and taught beginners After a decade of acting I was invited to return to NYU for the Grad Acting Departments Director s Lab which was a year-long fellowship that changed the trajectory of my career When I returned to karate after taking plenty of a multitude of years off I punched myself and ended up pulling my hamstring In my mind I was still a karataka but in my body I was not