In October of 1983, Anna Brennan directed Stageworks theater's first performance, "A Couple of White Chicks Standing Around Talking".

40 years later, the theater company remains focused on their vision to eradicate intolerance through performing arts and educational programs.

- The mission of Stageworks is to ignite the human spirit.

We can tell stories for people for whom stories are underrepresented in society as a whole.

Anna Brennan, who was the founding artistic director here at Stageworks, started the company in 1983 in a storefront in Ybor City.

From there, went on to create quite a body of work before she passed.

She was doing Athol Fugard, who was a South African playwright, dealing with apartheid, dealing with LGBT issues long before anybody else in town was.

There was always a commitment to social justice and to making social change.

She was the first and for many, many years the only female artistic director here in town.

But she kept after it and she knew that the work that Stageworks was doing was important.

And there was a great uncertainty about where one was going to rehearse or perform.

So we were all over the place.

We were at the JCC, the Straz.

Friday Morning Musicale, at HCCE Ybor.

We were looking for a permanent home.

Mercury Advisors, who developed this building, Grand Central and and the channel district.

We were able to take possession of this space.

we had to raise about $1.4 million in a capital campaign and that's where we've been.

One of the biggest bonuses when Anna was starting the company was a woman named Andrea Graham who was well familiar with a lot of the movers and shakers here in Tampa.

She was able to garner individual sponsorship and donations and then as the body of work grew we were able to go offer grants and other foundation support.

- Ola Mrs. Delgado.

- So as we approach the 40th anniversary season I wanted to make sure that we stayed true to the mission that we always have stayed true to, that we gave as many artists as possible the opportunity to participate and that we were making good work.

I chose then "The Color Purple", which has been a dream of mine to produce for quite some time.

♪ The Lord works in mysterious ways ♪ - The next show was a play called "Christmas Contiga", which is the East coast premiere - I'll do the real work.

- Right now we're doing a play called "The Smell of the Kill" which is only three people, but it's three of my very favorite actors here in town.

They had not really had a chance to play together as a trio, so I wanted to give them that chance.

- You're crazy.

- Oh no, she's right.

- No.

- The next is a world premier play and Mark Leib, who is a local playwright, he has written a play called "When the Righteous Triumph", which is about the lunch counter protests here in Tampa in the 1960s.

After that, we have a play called "Talking With".

It was a show that Anna Brennan had directed and produced several times in the history of the company.

The education programs are varied.

Most of the work that we do in the community in terms of education is not here in the theater.

We send teaching artists into schools and to community groups.

We also teach the opportunity for young people to write their own stories and perform them or choose a performance surrogate to do that.

The drumming is a very very big part of the education work that we do.

It's probably our most popular program as Alvon is our most popular instructor.

- Obviously, I'm there to share what I do, which is bucket drumming but we get into the very interesting conversation.

We start with the right left, right, left, right, left and every hit has a number and you start with your right hand, all your odd numbers on your right all your even numbers are on your left.

They also learn to focus and concentrate.

It's about working together as a team.

It's not all about me, me, me.

It's about us and how we sound together and how we play together.

I realized after they started playing, the drum became their voice.

They were playing really loudly and they were playing really well and after they were finished, I said, was that okay?

Yeah, that was great.

Do it again.

- Wow.

- Wow.

- Recently we've started to offer classes in improv.

It allows actors ways to sort of shed their inhibitions to sort of shed their closed minded thinking of what they can and cannot do.

It just gives actors a breadth of space and air in which to do their work.

Plus, it's super fun.

I think it can be for business professionals, it can be for anybody who wants to sort of loosen up a little bit and have some fun while you're doing it.

- Carla pulled me aside and said, "Hey, listen would you be interested in being part of a a program where we do plays in both English and Spanish?"

And I jumped at it.

Exploring the same story in two languages feels a lot like doing two different plays.

"Christmas Contigo" was our last Hispanic initiative project.

It's a very funny comedy about a woman who goes off to law school.

She lives in Miami with her Cuban family, and she comes back after two years with an unannounced fiance and hilarity ensues.

- If we are going to dance, we are going to dance with (indistinct).

- So one of the points of doing plays about Latino and Hispanic people is to A, give people a chance to see themselves, to offer a mirror.

As Shakespeare tells us, we all want love, we all want happiness.

We all want to experience some level of success.

And by seeing plays about people in other cultures we realize mostly how similar we are.

And so celebrating our common humanity is another reason for the Hispanic initiative.

- I think that artists are the historians of society and if we are not telling the stories of our community now and what is going on now, I think that future generations won't understand our times.

- To learn more, visit Stageworks theatre.org.