Alley Theatre history

Through 1948, the amateur group presented five more plays -- Jeffrey Dell’s “Payment Deferred,” Lillian Hellman’s “Another Part of the Forest,” Somerset Maugham’s “Caroline,” Clifford Odetes’s “Clash By Night,” and Norman Krasna’s “John Love Mary.”

The Alley re-opened on February 8, 1949, with a production of Lillian Helmann's The Children’s Hour.

At a heated board meeting in 1952, Vance won full artistic and managing control of the theater and made clear she sought to establish the Alley as a professional company.

In 1954, Vance convinced star actor Albert Dekker to guest-star in “Death of a Salesman,” which forced the the Alley to “go Equity,” and so become a fully professional company.

In 1956, the Alley Theatre received its first playwright in residence, Paul Zindel.

In 1959, the Ford Foundation gave the Alley Theatre a $156,000 one-to-one matching grant to assemble a resident ensemble of well-known actors with the promise of $200-a-week salaries over 40 or more weeks each season -- a major increase from the Alley’s standard minimum salary of $57.50 per week.

In 1961, Secretary of State Dean Rusk appointed Vance to the Advisory Committee on the Arts, part of the the United States Advisory Commission on International Education and Cultural Affairs.

By 1962 Nina Vance and her staff had conceived a larger dream – a new home for the Alley, in the downtown heart of Houston, a building designed and built as a theatre with two stages.

Zindel’s “Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds” had its world premiere at the Alley Theatre on May 12, 1965.

The new theater at 615 Texas Avenue was dedicated on October 13, 1968, after two years of construction.

In 1972, the Alley Theatre won a national Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects for its architectural design.

In 1977, Nina Vance was invited on the State Department tour of Russian theater, which led to an invitation from Nina to Galina Volchek, director of the Sovremennik Theater of Moscow, to come to Houston to produce Mikhail Roschin’s play, Echelon.

In 1980, upon the death of Vance, managing director Iris Siff took over the Alley’s management and artistic operations.

As an example, the 2001 season demonstrated the unique advantage of having two stages in the same building when the Alley staged House and Garden by Alan Ayckbourn.

18, 2002 for performances of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.’

In 2003, the Large Stage received a formal name, the Patricia Peckinpaugh Hubbard Stage, in honor of long-time Alley supporter, life trustee, and board president Patricia Hubbard.

The Alley Theatre Company’s concrete fortress on Texas Avenue reopened in September 2015 following its first major renovation.