Grantee Database
The Strindberg Laboratory
Grant Year
2025-26
Grant Program
General Operating Support
Award Amount
$13,200.00
Project Description
With support from the California Arts Council, The Strindberg Laboratory (TSL) will activate theater engagement programming that meaningfully and intentionally includes participants and audiences from diverse walks of life to help build bridges between individuals and communities that are normally separated. We do this by creating community-driven workshops, pop-up events, and productions for otherwise underserved participants and audiences, with all of our programming and performances provided free-of-charge.
Through the lens of our mission, TSL’s work is inspired by what we believe is everyone’s right to arts equity—the right for everyone and anyone, regardless of race, cultural background, socio-economic status, life experience, or citizenship status to create their own paths to self-discovery through theater storytelling, and to connect too-often under-heard voices and stories with a diverse audience.
Organization Summary
Central to TSL’s core programming is our community-driven productions, which we currently create through our Vaudeville Valley Troupe (VVT). Originally established by TSL in 2020 as a workshop for young adults on the autism spectrum, it is now the creative force driving TSL’s annual original productions generated by range of theater, puppetry, and multi-media artists with individuals on the autism spectrum joined by individuals with other neurodivergence and disabilities, individuals experiencing housing insecurity, returning citizens post-incarceration, and others. TSL is committed to providing all of our community artists with stipends for their work and presenting all of our performances free-of-charge. Our most recent production, “Step Forward for All The Poor People!” was performed in 2025, addressing poverty through a satirical take on conquering it once-and-for-all.
TSL provides theater arts workshops and presents special performances to communities that cannot typically participate in or attend our productions. Since 2021, we have provided in-service engagement at St. Barnabas Senior Services, Fairfax Senior Center, West Los Angeles Veterans Home, Central City Community Center, and Los Angeles Mission, among others, engaging senior citizens, U.S. military veterans, individuals experiencing homelessness, and individuals challenged with addition.
Critically linked to our productions and workshops, we have also developed our own unique theater games rooted in Forum Theatre, an approach explicitly devised to engage audiences as co-performers with a focus on developing open, creative, solution-oriented dialogues around social justice. This approach also informs TSL’s community festivals (such as Together in September in 2022) and ongoing pop-up events and activations in public spaces throughout the Los Angeles area.
In 2024, TSL also co-created Citizen Network News, a print-only international newspaper that addresses community-driven issues through an artist-activist lens. TSL believes this type of awareness and public conversation are key, fundamental building blocks for creating bold, innovative theater-makers and artists.
Organization
The Strindberg Laboratory
Address
PO Box 29824
LOS ANGELES
90029
County
Los Angeles
Region
South – Los Angeles & Orange
Website
Congressional District
California's 28th congressional district
State Assembly District
District 53
State Senate District
District 24
