Polly Klaas theater ready for its close-up

The Polly Klaas Community Theater, which has been closed for more than two decades, is springing back to life this weekend with a grand reopening celebration featuring a lineup of local performers.

The newly refurbished theater, a 110-year-old church building located on Western Avenue, is set to hold two shows on Saturday, Nov. 5, as part of its long-awaited grand reopening.

Raine Howe, executive director of the Polly Klaas Foundation – the local nonprofit founded in 1993 that works to increase safety for children – could barely contain her excitement.

“There are just really no words to adequately describe it,” she said Wednesday. “It’s almost surreal, because it’s been such a labor of love for our whole community in making this happen.”

This Saturday, Howe said, the theater will host two one-hour shows featuring six local performers and performing groups, including the Casa Grande High School chorus, the O’Brien Center of the Arts dance group, Alchemia, and Ella Wen, Sonoma County’s youth poet laureate. Shows will take place at 2 and 7 p.m. and tickets cost $10.

The celebration will kick off Friday with an invitation-only donor appreciation event. At the event, foundation board president Danny Fish will hang a portrait of Klaas at the theater’s entrance. Howe said Fish was the Petaluma Police Department officer who first responded to Klaas’s abduction in 1993.

“It’s kind of a full circle moment,” Howe said. “He’s just the right person to do that.”

In 1994, the former church-turned-performing arts center was dedicated to 12-year-old Petaluman Polly Klaas following her disappearance and murder the prior year. Klaas was known throughout the community as a passionate theater performer. The center hosted youth programs and performances until 2000, when the city closed it due to lack of building safety.

Renovation funding was hard to come by, but in 2018 the Polly Klaas Foundation launched a fundraising campaign to purchase the theater building from the city, and did so in April 2021 after raising more than $1 million.

The theater was previously expected to reopen in Fall 2021, but time constraints for volunteers and other issues held the project up, Howe said in an August interview. Even then, volunteers were working hard to get the place back into shape for community use.

Petaluma has only one dedicated local community theater company with its own theater – Cinnabar – and a number of local stages used at least sometimes for theater use, such as at the Cavanaugh Center, the Petaluma Community Center and the Phoenix and Mystic theaters.

But the opening of Polly Klaas Community Theater presents important new opportunities for stage events in town – and Dave and Juliet Pokorny, creators of the popular West Side Stories, are already taking advantage of it.

“That’s going to be our new home for West Side Stories” beginning in January,“ Juliet Pokorny said. She was excited for the move, she said, because “being in a real theater is going to honor the storyteller.”

Today’s fully renovated Polly Klaas theater features 96 new padded seats, six ADA seating areas, a new stage and backstage area, and new purple curtains – Polly's favorite color.

“I think the way we’re opening is a demonstration of the mission of this facility, which is to provide a space with an emphasis on youth but also for the whole community,” Howe said.

Amelia Parreira is a staff writer for the Argus-Courier. She can be reached at amelia.parreira@arguscourier.com or 707-521-5208.