By SHARON EBERSON
The new name is here — Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh — and with it, the hope for a fresh start and the creation of a sustainable, year-round Downtown resident theater company is in full swing.
A false start to finding a name for the blending of Pittsburgh Public Theater and Pittsburgh CLO had led to a public vote that attracted more than 3,000 submissions, with many voters choosing the option to submit their own. After reviewing each survey answer multiple times, Confluence Theater was chosen as a name that signifies celebrating Pittsburgh and coming together while honoring the legacy of the combined 130+-year history of the theaters being united as a single entity.
“Pittsburgh is a city built by people who make things, innovate, and reimagine what’s possible,” said Dr. Brett Ashley Crawford, the company’s Interim President & Executive Producer. “Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh honors that spirit, bringing together artists, audiences and educators to create a theater company that can grow with this city for generations to come.”
The press release announcing the new name notes that Confluence Theater marks not an end of two companies but the next chapter, as it embraces “the musicals that have defined Pittsburgh CLO’s legacy internationally, and the classics and contemporary plays of renown that have placed Pittsburgh Public Theater among America’s finest regional institutions.”
The idea of confluence is deeply artistic,” said Kyle Haden, Interim Artistic Director. “When different voices, traditions, and audiences meet, something new becomes possible. Confluence creates a space where Pittsburgh Public Theater audiences, Pittsburgh CLO audiences, and new generations of theatergoers can discover a shared future shaped by rich artistic experiences.”
Along with the announcement of the new name are the full-time hirings of staff who have been part of the process of unification: Aja Jones and Monica Bowen, who previously were with Pittsburgh Public as Chief of External Affairs and Director of Production & Operations, respectively; and, from Pittsburgh CLO, Win Fedele, who was Director of Development, Jim Scriven, Director of Education who also is in charge of the Gene Kelly Awards, and Angela Langill, formerly CLO’s Director Of Finance And Administration.
The company’s offices will be in the O’Reilly Theater, which has been mostly silent since the end of the Public’s final season, on Sunday, April 25, 2026. The first presentation of the new company at the O’Reilly, part of a four-part Prologue Season, will be Pittsburgher Jacob Ming-Trent’s autobiographical How Shakespeare Saved My Life, November 11–25, 2026.
The nationwide searches for a permanent President and Executive Director, and Artistic Director, are ongoing as the Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh readies a slate of 2027 shows, from February through December, in a variety of Pittsburgh Cultural Trust venues.
An August 28 post via “The Next Act: Updates from PPU & PCLO” newsletter declared: “Four weeks into the new organization, and we’ve quickly leapt from ‘we need to do that’ to ‘done’ in some big categories.”
On July 31, the merger became official, although there was a name delay — a word in the initial title had been announced for another Pittsburgh theater, sending the unification team back to the drawing board. The second time around, they got the public involved, with a survey that suggested some names and had a write-in option.
This is not the first time the confluence of the three rivers that form the Golden Triangle was chosen as a title that closely identifies with the city. The Confluence, a blend of reporting from the WESA Radio 90.5 newsroom, with interviews and roundtable conversations, ended production on August 4, 2023, after seven years on the air.
On August 20 of this year, nearly 100 Pittsburgh theater artists “across disciplines: musicians, union labor, actors, playwrights, and even some new folks to town” attended a gathering and asked “a lot of hard questions about the decisions we’re working through and the leadership in place to steer the organizations toward the future.”
Among the questions answered are that the company will be a member of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), the largest professional association of regional and nonprofit theaters in the United States. Plans for next year include seven “main stage productions and events in at least four different IATSE union houses,” employing Actors Equity talent.
Among the projections, including meeting a budget, is for more shows on more stages than the Public and Pittsburgh CLO combined, although in houses suited to the production.
Finally, the post included vision, mission and values statements:
VISION: Our company cultivates a multigenerational theater ecology that will sustain and grow the next 100 years of theater in Pittsburgh.
MISSION: Our company educates, empowers, and entertains theater creatives and patrons of all ages. Through the power of the classics of the past and the future, we will tell the stories that meet the needs of our community today.
VALUES: Called M.A.D.E. in Pittsburgh, the programming values were used to help guide the artistic decisions for 2026-2027:
- Meaningful: Provide the opportunity to inspire conversations with audiences across generations.
- Artistically Excellent: Give artists the resources to work at the top of their game.
- Data-led: Use real feedback to make programming and business decisions that are responsive to community needs.
- Equitable: Democratize access to experiencing and creating theater by addressing barriers both historic and systemic, and innovating new models of accessibility.
The new name comes with a new website, which currently includes the Prologue Season. Watch in the coming weeks for “a full 2027 calendar of musicals and plays,” including the previously announced Tony Award-winning Best Play and Pulitzer Prize-winner Purpose, and Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Learn more at https://confluencetheater.org/.
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Company, News
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