It’s a busy time at 901 Shasta Street in Redwood City, where TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is based. Actors rehearse for the upcoming world premiere of a new musical, while the Silicon Valley theater company grapples with a recent funding loss — the National Endowment for the Arts’ has withdrawn a $10,000 grant to fund its workshop for new and established Bay Area writers. Managing it all behind the scenes is Artistic Director Giovanna Sardelli, who served as the theater company’s director of new works for nearly a decade before taking on the artistic director role in 2023. We recently interviewed her to learn more. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell me more about your journey to this role. You used to work in a magic show?
A: Yes, I was born and raised in Las Vegas, so I had some strange job opportunities. I was a magician’s assistant for the Pendragons after I knew that I was not going to pursue being an actor, but I didn’t know what else to do. I took the job for a year and perfected looking surprised. In the back of my head I was like, ‘What do I want to do with my life? Who will I be?’ And then I got very lucky that the path of directing was laid out for me.
Q: I understand you’re directing an exciting new show. Tell me about it.
A: It’s a world premiere musical based on the play by Ed Grazcyk, “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.” It’s a lovely story of this group of friends who grew up in a tiny town in Texas, where nothing happens except that James Dean’s last movie was filmed in the next town over, and one of them got to be an extra. On the 20th anniversary of James Dean’s death, the disciples of James Dean are reuniting in this tiny town. It’s about this group of friends, the bravery of showing up to your old home as your new self, found family, love, forgiveness and the power of truth to change your life. It’s just beautiful, and the music is extraordinary. It’s by Dan Gillespie Sells.
Shakina, the lyricist and one of the leads in the show, is a trans activist and artist with whom I’ve been working for well over a decade. Back in ’79, when the show was first done, the reveal of the trans character was kind of a salacious thing. In ours, there’s no reveal — you know who Shakina is. By removing that, it put the heart of the play back where it should be, which is really on the women who were left behind in this little town.
Q: So what does a typical day look like for you?
A: I usually wake up and try to make sure I take care of myself, because the minute I turn on my phone or check an email, I’m working. There’s the business of running the theater day-to-day. Basically, from 8:30 to 12:30 I’m doing administrative things, reading plays, reaching out to playwrights, trying to figure out what’s next, having whatever meetings I need to to keep the machine operating, and doing fundraising calls. Then I try to stop and eat lunch, because at 1 p.m. I go into rehearsal until 9. Then I go home, and sometimes I have to work another hour or hour and a half. Sometimes I’m just so tired, I sit on the couch and stare, and then get up to do it again the next day.
Q: I understand TheatreWorks has had some financial challenges in recent years. What’s it like keeping a theater company alive in Silicon Valley in 2025?
A: TheatreWorks is doing relatively well. We had a horrible time coming out of the pandemic — it was difficult for the entire industry. And in fact, every day, theaters continue to close. But our community really showed up with our Save TheatreWorks Now campaign. We raised enough money, and we’ve been working hard to stabilize the company. Now, we can triumphantly say we are as precarious as any theater has ever been, as a not-for-profit.
Then the NEA pulled funding. To start, our government doesn’t fund the arts the way they’re funded in other countries. After theaters and other arts organizations had gone through the trouble of doing all the paperwork and the whole budgeting process, to have that funding removed was a slap in the face. The prerogative of the government is that they can change their mission, but the decent thing to do is to change it going forward, not retroactively. What people don’t realize is that for our organization, and every organization that lost that funding, they’re also losing that funding in the future, because to receive any funding from the government, you have to sign a document saying that you will not do work that focuses diversity, inclusion and equity — sign a document saying ‘We will be homogenous, inequitable and exclusionary.’ It’s absurd, right?
It means we have to work harder. We like to say we’re locally grown and nationally known, and we have robust support from our community. The thing about Silicon Valley, though, is that even though we all know we’re surrounded by billions of dollars, it doesn’t find its way into the community and into the arts in as robust a way as you would think. An NEA statistic says that more arts organizations closed in this area than others during and after COVID.
Q: Why do you think it is so important to have a thriving local theater company in Silicon Valley?
A: The number of people who say the theater saved them. There is something about theater. It’s ancient. It’s a secular church. It is coming together to share a space and share a story. There are studies on how it regulates your heartbeat and how it releases serotonin. In terms of programming, we can also shape what conversations we have as a community. We’re constantly asking, ‘What are we providing?’ Sometimes the answer is respite or joy. Or think about how much history you’ve learned through movies and plays, and not in school. Theater and art have always had a way of giving back lost histories. I’m embarrassed I learned about redlining through A Raisin in the Sun — not in school, but through a play. I learned about the Oklahoma riots, even though my family is from Oklahoma, from Marvel TV.
In Silicon Valley, so many of our artists, actors, writers and directors go on to populate Apple TV, Netflix or Hulu. You can take a direct line and say, ‘We are the de facto R&D wing of every movie theater.’ You learn the craft here in a way that you can’t learn it in other places.
Giovanna Sardelli
City of residence: Menlo Park, CA and Las Vegas, NV
Education: BA – University of Nevada, Las Vegas; MFA – Tisch School of the Arts, Graduate Acting Program, New York University
Age: 59
5 fun facts:
1. I was a magician’s assistant in a Vegas magic show before becoming a director.
2. I played Nurse Claire on the soap opera “Another World” for several years.
3. Karate was my passion for many years, I received my 2nd degree black belt and taught beginners.
4. After a decade of acting, I was invited to return to NYU for the Grad Acting Departments Director’s Lab, which was a year-long fellowship that changed the trajectory of my career.
5. When I returned to karate after taking many, many years off, I punched myself and ended up pulling my hamstring. In my mind, I was still a karataka but in my body I was…not.