Artist-founded and artist-driven, The Studio Theatre began in 1978 as a partnership between director Joy Zinoman and designer Russell Metheny, with the support of arts advocate Virginia Crawford. Driven by a love of bold, provocative theatre, they began presenting seasons full of innovative plays, many of which were extended by popular demand. From its beginning, the theatre worked in partnership with the Acting Conservatory that Joy Zinoman had founded three years earlier, in 1975.

Through its bold artistic programming The Studio Theatre has earned a national reputation for producing the very best in contemporary theatre with its area premieres of bold American and European works, innovative revivals and arresting performance art. Led by Founding Artistic Director Zinoman for over 30 years, The Studio Theatre offers the work of today’s greatest playwrights performed by the country’s leading actors in four intimate theatres. A highly energetic, eclectic urban theatre, The Studio is dedicated to the primacy of performance, intimacy between actor and audience, and the highest standard production values. The Studio Theatre has received well over 200 Helen Hayes Award nominations for artistic excellence since the awards were founded in 1985.

In 1978, Joy Zinoman’s Acting Conservatory was operating out of a shared studio space on Rhode Island Avenue that Zinoman had rented along with Liz Lehrman’s Dance Exchange and Marjorie Goldberg’s Zenith Gallery. Zinoman had just found a new collaborative partner in designer Russell Metheny; the two had worked together on an acclaimed production of Marat/Sade at Washington’s West End Theatre. They decided to embark on an experiment, to produce work in the Rhode Island Avenue space. Along with the excitement of the new venture came some drawbacks. Because the space was shared between the Acting Conservatory and the Dance Exchange, the sets had to be disassembled after every performance, so that classes could take place the next morning.

After three successful productions, The Rimers of Eldrich, Five Finger Exercise and Hotel Paradiso (now called The Studio Theatre’s “Pilot Season”), the decision was made to continue the venture. A walk up Fourteenth Street led the two to an abandoned hot dog warehouse on Church Street, where they built a theatre from the ground up, and the experiment continued. The intimate 110-seat theatre they built in that space served The Woolly Mammoth Theatre and later The Studio 2ndStage from 2000 to 2001.

When Joy Zinoman and Russell Metheny founded The Studio Theatre, neither had in mind the mission of the theatre as it exists today: “to produce the best in contemporary theatre.” But the two did share a deeply ingrained fascination with theatrical style. Zinoman came to Washington from 13 years in Asia, where she became fluent in several Asian languages, studied Peking Opera, and taught at colleges in Taiwan and Kuala Lumpur, as well as in Laos and Thailand. Under Zinoman and Metheny’s direction, The Studio Theatre’s early seasons were exuberant and eclectic celebrations of style, ranging from French farce to traditional Indian performance. In 1980-1981, for example, the season included Greek tragedy (Medea), commedia dell’arte (Harlequin Goes to Bologna), classic realism (The Seagull) and twentieth-century naturalism (A Raisin in the Sun).

With productions like Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July in 1983, The Studio Theatre began to gravitate toward a kind of “house style” of performance, which involved a powerful focus on acting and the creation of an intimate relationship between actor and audience. As the theatre grew and developed, its seasons grew more focused on contemporary playwriting, but the production and staging still embraced a multitude of styles.

By the mid 1980s, Zinoman was ready for a different kind of experimentation. The seasons she chose challenged directors and actors with every production; she was drawn to work that demanded a powerful learning experience for the cast and creative team. The theatre produced a musical for the first time (William Finn’s March of the Falsettos), took on contemporary issues like AIDS, and tackled diverse and important classics of Western theatre (Euripides’ The Bacchae, Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness, Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde). In the late 80s, Zinoman also began to branch out in terms of programming. She established two other distinct producing wings within The Studio Theatre: The Studio 2ndStage, a director’s playground where raw, edgy productions were the order of the day, and Special Events, which featured performing artists whose work might otherwise not be seen in Washington. These new producing wings complemented The Studio Theatre’s regular season, broadening the work available to Zinoman’s audiences.

By the 1990s, The Studio Theatre’s seasons began to look similar to the ones still being chosen today: dominated by the work of important contemporary writers like August Wilson, Paula Vogel, Tom Stoppard, and Caryl Churchill, offset by the annual production of a modern classic: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Anton Chekhov. Zinoman began to insist on a “literary bottom line,” valuing contemporary works with real value as dramatic literature that might stand the test of time.

This core mission led to sold out houses which soon dictated a need for a still larger space. In October 1987, the theatre moved to its current location at 1333 P St, NW, an historic Peerless and REO automobile showroom that had become the Petrovich Auto Repair Shop. The Studio Theatre converted the ground floor into the 200-seat Mead Theatre and built offices and classrooms on the third floor. In 1993, the Theatre purchased the building, successfully completing Phase I of the Campaign to Secure the Future. In March 1997, The Studio completed a sweeping $5.5 million renovation (designed by Russell Metheny) of the building, successfully completing Phase II of the capital campaign. The major component from the renovation was the addition of the Milton Theatre, a 200-seat sister space to the Mead Theatre, making The Studio Theatre a national trendsetter and developer of the two-theatre model. Scheduled productions alternated between one space and the other, or could be moved from one space to the other, so that a successful show could extend its run almost indefinitely without disrupting the rest of the season schedule.

Founding Artistic Director Joy Zinoman grew up in Chicago, where there is a long tradition of transforming industrial space into theatres and art galleries. In search of a home for her fledgling theatre, Zinoman looked for similar kinds of buildings in Washington, but the Nation’s Capital has no real history of industrial production. Instead, Zinoman found “Automobile Row,” a stretch of 14^th Street that was once devoted to automobile showrooms and garages. Here she found warehouses with column spans wide enough to convert to theatre spaces. Here she made a home for her theatre, and here she stayed for thirty years.

The introduction of art into industrial neighborhoods transforms more than buildings. Since 1978, the resurgence of the Studio District has mirrored the growth of The Studio Theatre itself. The neighborhood, blighted by the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., has been rediscovered by an appreciative city. Its rejuvenated streets have kept their human scale, as housing grew up alongside small businesses and restaurants. Anchored by The Studio Theatre, the truly mixed-use neighborhood has become a thriving cultural and business destination.