Bohemian’s Best Theater Troupe in Napa County 2018
Valley Players is both honored and humbled to be chosen by the readers of the North Bay Bohemian as Best Theater Troupe in Napa County. We are also very proud to have been included as one of the writer’s picks for Culture!
Best Feminist Theater Troupe
About 70 percent of theatergoers are women over 40. However, most plays are written with either younger women or men in mind, leaving very little for its biggest audience. In 2016, June Alane Reif, president of the Valley Players board of directors, got together with some of her friends to do something about that gender imbalance. Napa’s Valley Players, which became incorporated just last year, operate with the goal of empowering women over 40 on stage and behind the scenes as stagehands. While still a new group with only a handful of members, the Players have produced such plays as Harold Pinter’s The Lover and Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which feature older players or have non–age specific roles. They have also collaborated with local playwrights, such as Sonoma County resident Lorraine Midanik, who wrote a screenplay the troupe will perform soon. According to Reif, women who have retired from theater as they got older have been coming out of the woodwork to help out. The theater company is always looking for more volunteers, and will gladly take anyone of any age and gender.
—A.R.