Bay Area sculptor and theater professional Michael Cook, a resident designer and production manager for eight years during the early days of our company—then called Berkeley Shakespeare Festival—is paying homage to the artists he calls the “unsung heroes” of theater. His sculpture exhibit, Berkeley Shakespeare Festival: Memories of the Early Years is a series of 40 busts of the directors, set designers, stage managers, sound and lighting technicians, costume designers, graphic artists, and stagehands who brought Shakespeare to the stage in those years in Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park and then, as we became the California Shakespeare Festival, to our current home, the Bruns Amphitheater in the Orinda hills. Included in the collection are likenesses of such luminaries as inaugural Artistic Director Dakin Matthews; original Bruns architect Gene Angell; San Francisco Chronicle critic Rob Hurwitt; Jim Reber (who started San Jose Rep); actors Robert Sicular, Nancy Carlin, Howard Swain, James Carpenter, and Julian Lopez-Morillas; and many others.

The installation is on display through January 30 at Addison Street Windows Gallery (2018 Addison St, Berkeley, in the windows across the street from Berkeley Rep and Aurora Theatre), and can be viewed 24 hours a day from the sidewalk. The exhibit is sponsored by the Civic Arts Program of the City of Berkeley, in cooperation with the Civic Arts Commission. Cook now teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California, where he is also the resident scenic and lighting designer for the Performing Arts department, the manager of the in-house theater, and much more. In 2006, Cook was honored with the Freeman Award from the Eugene O’Neill Foundation in Danville.