Venue: Playhouse Theatre
Town: Seattle, US

The Playhouse Theatre (later University of Washington Playhouse Theatre, now officially Floyd and Delores Jones Playhouse) is a theater located at 4045 University Way NE (41st St) on The Ave in the University District, Seattle, Washington. It was converted from a tile warehouse in 1930 by Burton and Florence James, who set up the Seattle Repertory Playhouse with multi-ethnic performers and audiences. They received funding during the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) of the New Deal to set up the Negro Repertory Company, one of four FTP units in Seattle, which was based at their theatre. The facility was sold to the University of Washington in 1950, which used it for its theatre department. In 1967 it was converted from a proscenium to a thrust stage. From 2007 to 2009, the building was reconstructed to add a story and make numerous improvements. New Yorkers Burton James (1888-1951) and Florence James (1892-1988) came to Seattle in 1923 to start the theater department of what was then the Cornish School and is now the Cornish College of the Arts. In 1928, the Jameses quit Cornish after the school's board of directors objected to a production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author because of its brothel scene. They formed the Seattle Repertory Playhouse (no relation to today's Seattle Repertory Theatre). The venturesome, multi-ethnic, multiracial, and sometimes explicitly socialist company performed a wide repertoire, ranging "from popular comedies to works by Ibsen and Goethe". In 1930, they established themselves in the Playhouse Theatre, which they constructed in a former tile warehouse at the corner of NE 41st Street and University Way NE ("The Ave") in the University District. The Jameses also taught some classes at the University of Washington. In 1933 the theater scored a major success with In Abraham's Bosom. Featuring a largely black cast and a gospel choir, it was co-produced with Seattle's First African Methodist Episcopal Church. When the Federa