South Coast Repertory (SCR) is a professional theatre company located in Costa Mesa, California. Founded in 1964, it currently has three stages.
- Venue
- South Coast Repertory
- Address
- 655 Town Center Drive, PO Box 2197
- Town
- California, US
South Coast Repertory (SCR) is a professional theatre company located in Costa Mesa, California. Founded in 1964, it currently has three stages. SCR produces old plays, new plays, Theatre for Young Audiences, and offers year-round programs in education and outreach. SCR's extensive new play development program, The Lab@SCR, consists of commissions, residencies, readings, and workshops, from which world premieres are produced each season. Among the plays commissioned and introduced at SCR are Donald Margulies' Sight Unseen, and Brooklyn Boy; Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain and The Violet Hour; David Henry Hwang's Golden Child; and Amy Freed's The Beard of Avon. These plays were commissioned and developed through the Pacific Playwrights Festival. Forty percent of the plays SCR has produced have been world, American, or West Coast premieres. In 1988, SCR received the Regional Theatre Tony Award for Distinguished Achievement, particularly in the area of new play development. David Emmes and Martin Benson attended San Francisco State University. After graduation, Emmes and Benson gathered a few San Francisco friends in summer 1963 to stage Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde at the Off-Broadway Theatre in Long Beach, California. Emmes and Benson continued by touring to rented stages. In November 1964, SCR's first production, Molière's Tartuffe, opened at the Newport Beach Ebell Club. The next step would be their own location, a theatre in Orange County, California. For their Second Step, a two-story marine hardware store on Balboa Peninsula was rented and converted into a 75-seat proscenium stage. It opened on March 12, 1965, with a production of Waiting for Godot. For years, everyone involved maintained full-time day jobs and worked nights and weekends without pay. Within two years, artistic and financial momentum had picked up and SCR looked toward its Third Step: a converted Sprouse-Reitz Variety Store on Newport Boulevard in Costa Mesa. The building, adapted to hold