Backstage Travels

SARA HENNESSY: FOUNDER, BACKSTAGE TRAVELS

Sara began organizing theatre travel tours in 2013 and has since taken groups on trips to NYC, London, Chicago,  Los Angeles and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Based in Portland, OR, she has spent the last 20 years working in theatre in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland.  For more than 15 years, she also worked in Project Management/Training  for Capital Group Companies, Yahoo! and IAC.  Backstage Travels was born when she decided to combine her planning and organization skills, arts experience and and love for travel into a business.

After receiving her BA in Theatre from Texas A&M University, Sara moved to Chicago where she studied and performed long-form improvisation at the famed ImprovOlympic and toured colleges with the comedy troupe Freudian Slip.  In Chicago she co-starred in the sold-out world premiere run of Ramblers by John Boston, which the Chicago Tribune's Chris Jones named "Best Storefront Production of 1998", calling the young cast "a feast of raw talent".  She moved to L.A. for the play's Los Angeles Premiere. In L.A., she trained at the renowned classical repertory theatre, A Noise Within, before co-founding Furious Theatre Company in 2001.  After an auspicious debut season in a raw warehouse space in Pasadena, the legendary Pasadena Playhouse granted Furious Theatre an ongoing residency at its second stage where the company produced the majority of its productions.

With Furious Theatre, she produced over 25 productions, which garnered numerous awards including Backstage West’s Debut Award, Pasadena Arts Council’s Gold Crown Award for Excellence in the Arts, and several Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, L.A. Weekly, and NAACP Awards. Its impressive body of work prompted the L.A. Weekly to designate Furious Theatre Company as one of L.A.’s “Best Theatres of the Decade” in 2010.

In 2013, she moved to Portland, OR with her family when her husband, Dámaso Rodriguez, was hired as Artists Repertory Theatre's Artistic Director.  She started planning and leading theatre tours for Artists Rep, and the rest is history!