In the early 1940's a very talented and highly dedicated teacher taught drama in Room 14 at Western Canada High school. Her name was Betty Mitchell and her methods were decidedly avant grade. Her pupils were so inspired to continue in theatre after leaving high school that Miss Mitchell constituted for them an amateur theatre company. This was the birth of "Workshop 14", the forerunner of Workshop Theatre. Workshop 14 was inclined to the classics and "meaty" dramas, and year after year won coveted awards at the Dominion Drama Festival.

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From 1950 through 1965, Workshop 14 thrived. It mounted the inaugural drama production ("Teahouse of the August Moon") in the brand new Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium. It later amalgamated with the "Musicians and actors Club", housed in the old Isis Movie House, across the railway tracks on First Street S.W., and become "Mac 14". Those were wonderful years with an excellent theatre upstairs and an exciting night club downstairs, and it became clear that Mac 14 was evolving rapidly into a professional theatre group in Calgary. It was at the end of this era that we pick up the threads of Workshop Theatre.

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When Theatre Calgary emerged from Mac 14, it was felt that an amateur arm should  continue in the footsteps of what had been a noble constituent of Calgary's community theatre scene. The predominance of membership in this newly-consitiuted continuation of Workshop 14 happened to be British in origin, so it was not surprising that the new Workshop Theatre embarked on a long and successful run of English plays mainly in farces with their typical sexual overtones and those famous British "Who-Dun-Its". I was privileged to direct and act in several of them. In recent years, however, the choices have seen

some modification from that pattern to a more eclectic fare.