I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”
-Oscar Wilde

StageWest Founders: Tom Blackett, Pat Henson, Jim Jacobson, Ron Lambert, Laurince D. McElroy
In Memory: Anne Juneau, Nancy Schneider

1995-1996

A group of theatrical friends and collaborators meet, discuss, organize and dream of forming a new theater company in Des Moines. Let’s find a barn and put on a show. We do. StageWest is born. Sponsored by the AIDS Project of Central Iowa, we present the premiere production of Voices That Care: Stories and Encouragements for People with AIDS/HIV and Those Who Care for Them, an adaptation for the stage written by StageWest founding member Laurince D. McElroy, presented at the First Unitarian Church.

1997

StageWest presents its first play at the Civic Center’s Stoner Theater, the American premiere of Out of Spite: Tales of Survival in Sarajevo, based on the diaries of Elma Softic, during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s.

The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose -- and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization.
- John F. Kennedy StageWest