Green Room Theatre Company

Green Room Theatre Company, based in Coachella Valley (GRTCCV), aims to bring professional theatre and dance performances and education to under-resourced neighborhoods, promoting workforce development, community mental health, and general literacy. In its fifteenth season, Green Room will feature "Act Against Bullying," a project comprising a touring production of the bilingual play, Maggie Magalita, and youth discussion groups in partnership with Boo2Bullying and the Ophelia Project. The goal is to reach over 2,000 students, including at-risk, newcomer, and English Language Learner populations, as well as their teachers, parents, and families.

Maggie Magalita, by Tony nominee Wendy Kesselman (The Diary of Anne Frank), addresses the concerns of at-risk and immigrant youth, covering topics such as bullying, assimilation, and intergenerational relationships. The play follows Maggie, a teenager who faced severe bullying upon immigrating to America in elementary school. Now a high school student, Maggie struggles to reconcile her immigrant background and poverty with her academic and social success. When her grandmother comes to live with Maggie and her mother in their tiny apartment, Maggie finds herself resenting her abuela for speaking only Spanish and not assimilating quickly enough.

The educational component of the project, funded by the Anderson Children's Foundation and a California Arts Council Grant, includes six weekly sessions for each group of teens and/or “tweens”, combining discussion and theatre training. Listening sessions will gather input from local teens through Ophelia Project interns. Mentored youth discussion groups will focus on bullying prevention and responses. Green Room instructors, Boo2Bullying ambassadors, and Ophelia interns will lead discussions about the play's themes and characters and facilitate theatre training exercises for fun and self-discovery.

Info Coming Soon!

Green Room Theatre Company is one of a handful of theatre companies nationwide that has been able to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic this summer by radically redesigning its comprehensive and intensive conservatory to be held online. Teens and children from the Coachella Valley and beyond have responded enthusiastically by filling of every available seat in a broad range of 17 distance learning theatre and film classes. Many have also won roles in five different short plays to be livecast professionally on July 17.

Now in its twelfth season, GRTC’s Summer Conservatory provides serious young artists ages 8 to 18 with an intensive, supportive pre-professional training experience that can be the first major step on a career pathway to performance or technical theatre.

This year students are enjoying intimate classes such as Playwriting and Theatre Design, and larger classes of up to 20 such as Singing for the Actor and Improv and Clowning. Instruction is differentiated with separate sections for Kids Grades 3-6 and Teens ages 12-18. 

All students who are residents of the Coachella Valley receive full scholarships - underwritten in part by our Anderson Children’s Foundation grant – and work with 13 top professional teaching artists who livestream instruction from New York, Hollywood, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The program is designed and led by a core of veteran credentialed teachers and college professors. This year, five advanced high school students ages 16-18 are receiving paying internships to work closely with expert designers, filmmakers, and stage directors. Three more interns from Stanford University are training in marketing, social media, and streaming the final live performances.

Green Room has also deepened its long-time partnership with Palm Springs Women in Film and Television (PSWIFT) to design and offer new courses including Acting for the Camera; Hollywood Audition; and Making the Short, Short Film with four of Hollywood’s most successful women actors, filmmakers and screenwriters. 

Courses such as Playwriting, Short Film, and Creative Drama enable students to find a voice and share personal experiences from this unprecedented historic time. Awareness of their unique role as citizen artists in this challenging summer of COVID-19 and social protest will empower them to articulate and record the lessons they and their families are learning. 

A final set of performances, streamed live and/or recorded on our website, will provide students with a platform to share with both our desert community and a worldwide audience.

This marks the ninth successful season for Green Room Theatre's Summer Conservatory. This unique program offers young artists ages 8 to 18 the desert's most comprehensive summer theatre program: an intensive, career pathway five-week program in state-of-the-art classrooms at CSUSB's Palm Desert Campus. Curriculum includes stage dialects, acting, voice, dance, stage combat, dramatic theory, improvisation, and technical theatre. The program also offers paid apprenticeships for several aspiring teachers.

The Conservatory culminates on July 19 and 20, 2017, with performances of a fully mounted musical in the Indian Wells Theatre, serving 1000 patrons of all ages of whom about 500 are children. This summer's show is Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

Over the past few decades the arts - particularly theatre and dance - have been steadily eroded from the curriculum in our region's schools. The Conservatory provides access to top-quality training for serious young artists, regardless of ability to pay.

It actively recruits an economically and ethnically diverse student population from traditionally underserved communities in the desert. Each year the expert teaching staff also supports several students with disabilities such as Williams Syndrome, hearing loss, dyslexia, and ADHD.

Late-Breaking News: This summer the Conservatory launches a new partnership with The Fountains at Carlotta Senior Residence, Palm Desert. On July 11, students perform an evening Shakespeare showcase of sonnets, songs, and short monologues to residents at The Fountains. Heading the roster is Nick Wass, Palm Springs High School Class ‘17, who recently won regionals in the English Speaking Union’s national Shakespeare competition. Carlotta residents also receive free tickets to a matinee performance of The Pirates of Penzance.