It was the first professional theatre on the west coast to premiere many of the modern American classics such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and the world dramas of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter.
[1] For the 1953–1954 season, the Workshop offered six plays: Lysistrata, by Aristophanes; Venus Observed, by Christopher Fry; Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller; a revival of Playboy; The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov; and Tonight at 8.30, by Noël Coward.
[2] When the Actor's Workshop began in 1952, all the talk in America's progressive theatre ranks was of “decentralization," and ANTA’s "forty-theatre plan" was in its formative stage.
[5] The guiding artistic vision of the Workshop was a legacy of the Group Theatre of the 1930s,[6] with the troupe's eyes firmly on social responsibility and ensemble principles.
[9] For years, the company struggled financially but retained relative artistic autonomy which shifted in the 1959–60 season, when the Ford Foundation, through its "Program for Playwrights", began to grant aid to selected regional theaters [10] and became, in the process, quite influential.