Pinecones and Portals creates immersive outdoor theater for families, rooted in accessibility, cultural relevance, and artistic excellence. As a Deaf-led company, we understand that access is economic, physical, cultural, and linguistic. We offer subsidized tickets, ADA-accessible routes, ASL interpretation, sensory guides, and Spanish-language programming. We pay our artists a living wage because dignified compensation and excellent art are inseparable.

Inclusive Outdoor Theater Productions
Our flagship program presents immersive, site-specific plays in East Bay parks. We work primarily in Codornices Park in Berkeley and Piedmont Park in Piedmont, where we have a partnership with Eva Phalen of the Piedmont Recreation Department. Audiences journey through the park walking alongside characters, stumbling into scenes along the trail. Sometimes the action happens up close, other times a character appears across a field or down a hill, only to reappear around the next corner. The park itself is a collaborator, always improvising. When a hawk flew alongside us during Alice in Wander Land, the audience collectively decided it was one of the Red Queen’s spies. The park handed us an unexpected character and the audience ran with it. Each show includes ASL interpretation, neurodivergent accommodations, and at least one ADA-accessible performance. Bilingual program lead CoiCoi Duncan creates Spanish-language programming rooted in her experience as a Colombian immigrant and social circus artist.

Campfire Stories
A monthly Friday evening gathering at Mariposa Grove Community Garden in Oakland. Families gather around a live fire for original music, a participatory story, a world-building craft, and s’mores. Stories are memorized and interactive. Storytellers bring tales from their own cultural traditions, rooting ancient wisdom in the natural world around us. Chilean storyteller Paz Hidalgo brought a story from Tierra del Fuego about the origins of autumn. Families connected the story to this place by collecting fallen leaves for the craft.