Playhouse Theatre (Seattle)

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.

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.

The venturesome, multi-ethnic, multiracial, and sometimes explicitly socialist company performed a wide repertoire, ranging "from popular comedies to works by Ibsen and Goethe".

Featuring a largely black cast and a gospel choir, it was co-produced with Seattle's First African Methodist Episcopal Church.

[2][4] When the Federal Theatre Project began in 1935 during the New Deal era, the University of Washington's director Glenn Hughes applied to the program for funding for a unit.

[2] The players rejected producing George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess after some rehearsals, because they found the material degrading and offensive.

In 1967, Greg Falls (later the founder of Seattle's ACT Theatre), influenced by the ideas of such avant garde directors as Peter Brook, converted the building from a proscenium to a thrust stage.

Floyd Jones, who is still alive, sees the name as a tribute to his late wife, who was "devoted to the arts, social justice, and Democratic politics… always thrilled when they took on plays… like All Powers Necessary and Convenient", which was about the Canwell hearings of the 1940s.