The Lit Moon Theatre Company


Founded in 1991, Lit Moon is a collective of theatre artists dedicated to the development and presentation of alternative theatre. Since the beginning, the company has been recognized as Santa Barbara’s most innovative and ambitious company.

The mission of the Lit Moon Theatre Company is “to provide the Santa Barbara area with an alternative to mainstream theatre, and to offer educational opportunities that broaden and deepen an understanding of world theatre and cultural traditions. Through both process and product, Lit Moon's commitment to exploration, education, and invention offers the Santa Barbara community an imaginative and forward-looking company that complements the existing mainstream theatre, and contributes to the overall artistic diversity of the area.

In short, the intention of the Lit Moon Theatre Company is to help cultivate a dynamic, lively theatre community in Santa Barbara through the injection of theatre from other countries and cultures; to help create inter-cultural aesthetic work; and to educate, entertain, and enliven our immediate Santa Barbara audience.

Lit Moon models itself upon European laboratory theatre companies that integrate aesthetic experimentation with cross-cultural interaction and understanding. Since 1998, Lit Moon has used various tools to foster this coupling of aesthetic development and cultural investigation, including producing international theatre festivals, organizing artistic residencies and collaborations, providing workshops and classes, and establishing the company’s own touring.

Since the development of this vision, The Lit Moon World Theater Festival has presented some of the most influential chamber theatre companies from Eastern and Central Europe, developed numerous long-term collaborations with several individual artists, and in 2006 founded the Lit Moon World Shakespeare Festival, which played to sold-out audiences in October.

Since 2000, the company has appeared at the 2000 Month of Culture Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria; the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (2001); the Montreal Fringe Festival (2003); the Montreal Wildside Festival, the Fireman’s Theatre in Prague and the Gdansk Shakespearean Festival (2004); the Gdansk Shakespearean Festival and Teatr Modjeska, Legnica, Poland (2006); and has accepted invitations to play at the City International Festival in Legnica and the MOT Festival of International Theatre in Skopje, Macedonia for 2007.

Since its inception, Lit Moon has strived to provide, in the words of D.J. Palladino's review of the 2003 Lit Moon World Theater Festival, "an unrelenting window onto the world of theatrical possibility."

What the Critics Say


“Lit Moon’s ... approach to storytelling through a marriage of movement-based narrative with traditional techniques is inspiring in its sense of reawakened possibilities.”
Philip Brandes, Santa Barbara News-Press
"Lit Moon’s acting skills… are as impressive as their innovations, which include the use of microphones, film projection, strategic outbursts of graffiti-writing and accompaniment by an onstage multi-instrumentalist. The company’s style, melding the rigours of physical theatre with classic text, makes them pioneers, if not unique."
Matt Radz, Montreal Gazette
"Launching this year’s Lit Moon World Theater Festival, Shakespeare’s timeless ruminations on revenge, mortality and existence undergo a stunning metamorphosis in an uncompromising, radical staging that unfolds with riveting urgency."
Phil Brandes, Santa Barbara News Press

And Then There are Awards


Lit Moon consistently wins awards for its theatrical innovation, original music scores, costumes and masks, scenic and lighting design, acting, directing, production, and choreography.

2005 saw Lit Moon win 4 Independent Theatre Awards - More than any other Santa Barbara theater company!