Shotgun Players

Over the past seventeen years, The Shotgun Players has grown from an ensemble of four actors and an artistic director to a company with 20 twenty artists producing three classic and two new plays each season for 14,000 patrons at their 150 seat theater in South Berkeley and in Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park. Shotgun stands out among theater companies in the Bay Area for their critically acclaimed new plays and for cultivating relationships with the nation’s most talented young playwrights including 2007 Pulitzer prize finalist Eisa Davis and 2007 Obie winner Adam Bock, and Mark Jackson (a 2003 Hewlett fellow at the Djerassi Residents Artist Program). In 2009 Shotgun will produce a new play by Marcus Gardley about the women who worked the Richmond California shipyards in WWII in collaboration with Hewlett grantee the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts. Supported by the Hewlett Foundation since 2004, Shotgun continues to match its artistic ambition with intelligently planned, and even audacious, organizational development. In 2007 Shotgun became the nation’s first 100% solar powered theater in part due to funds provided by Hewlett to install solar panels on the roof of its home theater, the Ashby Stage. As it approaches its 20th anniversary Shotgun, with a $500,000 annual budget, is emerging as a mid-size theater at a time and in a region that, as an Irvine Foundation study on the arts in California found "mid size organizations may suffer the most as talent becomes more expensive and funding more competitive." Increased support for Shotgun will enable the organization to increase support for artists, ramp up individual and corporate funding and deepen connections with neighbors in South Berkeley in order to make good on a mission to serve the community in which they work and create. (Renewal $150,000/3 years)