Heart Repertory Firm, Walnut Creek’s longtime skilled theater troupe, introduced Wednesday it has chosen a brand new inventive director with a repute for championing range and LGBTQ+ points on and off the stage.
Matt M. Morrow, who most lately had been government inventive director at San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre, the third oldest LGBTQIA+ theatre within the nation, will begin part-time at Heart Rep later this month, working with performing inventive director Markus Potter. He’ll assume full-time duties at Heart Rep, which operates out of the Lesher Heart for the Arts in Walnut Creek, in August.
“We're thrilled to welcome Matt as the following inventive chief of Heart Rep and a member of the Lesher Heart management group,” stated Carolyn Jackson, basic supervisor of the Lesher Heart and managing director of Heart
Rep. “Matt brings a contemporary imaginative and prescient for balancing much-loved conventional works alongside new voices, a wealth of expertise in fundraising and organizational management, and a observe file of significant actions to advance range, fairness, and inclusion at theatre corporations.”
“His real heat, caring, and fervour for serving the neighborhood shines via and we are able to’t watch for the Bay Space to get to know Matt,” Jackson added.
Morrow spent eight years at Diversionary Theatre, the place he offered such world premieres as Miranda Rose Corridor’s “The Home of Nice Mercy,” garnered a number of manufacturing awards and was stated to have spearheaded a marketing campaign to de-gender theatrical awards by the native critic’s circle.
Earlier than that, Morrow was affiliate inventive director of Metropolis Theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the place he specialised in producing new works. He additionally spent 20 years working in New York for such corporations as Amas Musical
Theatre, stated to be the nation’s first firm dedicated to non-traditional, multi-ethnic casting, in addition to Playwrights Horizons, Cherry
Lane Theatre, and PlayCo.
“I’m honored and overjoyed to be becoming a member of the unbelievable Heart Rep household and the East Bay neighborhood,” Morrow stated in a press release. “My purpose as a theater-maker is to bolster a various household of artists and humanities lovers via the
programming of formidable work that entertains and provokes in equal measures.”
Heart Rep, one of many nation’s few city-owned-and-run stage corporations, has been and not using a fulltime inventive director because it laid off Michael Butler throughout the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020. It’s subsequent manufacturing, the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical “Within the Heights,” opens Might 27.