Luis Saguar and Margo Hall in Jessica Hagedorn's "Stairway to Heaven"

Campo Santo

Founded in 1996, Campo Santo is an award-winning multi-cultural ensemble committed to developing and premiering new American Theatre and to nurturing diverse new audiences for the performing arts. Campo Santo cultivates playwrights, fiction writers and poets to work in an intimate, interactive community based setting to create new theatrical experiences that reflect and reinvent our society.

Statement

Campo Santo is Spanish for sacred ground.  Like the roots of our name, we are taking the sacred form of storytelling and using it as a tool to bond community through socially relevant plays.  We want to show the audience the world we live in and see in the audience the world we come from.  We have nurtured more than 40 World Premieres and another 30 interdisciplinary performance pieces to fruition. Campo Santo programs fill to capacity and our critically acclaimed World Premiere plays attract standing room only crowds.  

At Campo Santo’s core, is a New Play Development Program that cultivates playwrights, poets and fiction writers of exceptional vision to develop new plays with our company of artists and our community from conception through to World Premiere.  We are widely regarded for our participatory community-based development process and for the unique success we have had nurturing a very loyal, young and diverse constituency.

We focus on fostering long-term relationships with writers that emphasize the collaborative creative process and that aim to tell the stories of immigrant and marginalized communities and infuse the tradition of theatre with vital new life.  One of our greatest successes has been our ability to create long term relationships with internationally known writers who are leaders in developing work that is broadening and diversifying the American voice - including Jimmy Santiago Baca, Philip Kan Gotanda, Jessica Hagedorn, Naomi Iizuka, Denis Johnson, and Octavio Solis, to name a few. Over the years we have developed an organic process for creating new plays that has allowed us to build a very diverse constituency made up of committed collaborators and loyal audience members.  This process simultaneously balances and integrates the particular needs of the artistic collaborators with an institutional commitment to reach and involve new people in the projects as they are coming alive, to build community partnerships, and to create programs and activities that allow people to contribute and respond creatively to the issues, stories, and themes we are grappling with. Our achievements have reached well beyond the specific premiere productions.   

"I have a handful of people who read the play as hard as I wrote it." -- Denis Johnson