Santa Barbara Literary Festival Writes a New Chapter for Downtown’s Historic Spaces

The upcoming Santa Barbara Literary Festival will transport attendees into written worlds, all while their feet are firmly planted in the city’s most iconic spaces.

Workshops, panels, keynote speakers, and pop-ups will fill venues with mystery, fantasy, and romance. 

Being no strangers to drama, two of the festival’s most historic venues, the Lobero and Alhecama theaters, are primed to stitch new prose into their performing arts past. 

“Theater and literature are very close cousins,” said Marianne Clark, executive director of the Lobero Theatre Foundation. 

She noted playwrights — Shakespeare, for one — whose words often resonate through the Lobero, as well as books that have been adapted for the stage, such as A Christmas Carol. 

“And then there have been theater companies whose whole mission has been to present literary works,” she said.

That includes theater company Speaking of Stories, created by Steven Gilbar in 1994, where actors read stories aloud with flair. 

Another, called Boxtales — which acted out textbook folk tales and myths for children — launched in 1994 with the support of the Lobero’s then–Executive Director Nancy Lynn and Boardmember Marlyn Bernstein. It still tours today. 

“The Lobero is super connected to the literary world, so it’s a perfect place for a literary festival to be launched,” Clark said. 

It’s a theater with stories itself, dating back to its founding in 1873 as the Lobero Opera House. The original structure had to be torn down and rebuilt in 1924, but its current digs at the corner of Canon Perdido and Anacapa streets have persisted for a century. 

During the same weekend of the literary festival, coincidentally, the Lobero is hosting Opera Santa Barbara’s production of Elmer Gantry, a contemporary opera based on a 1927 novel by Sinclair Lewis. 

Opera singers need a day to rest their voices between performances, which opened up a “dark day” to host the festival on Saturday. The lineup includes a pop-up about crime stories, screenwriter Bob Gale on Back to the Future, and a keynote by American novelist Walter Mosley. 

Clark hopes people interested in the literary festival may also want to attend the literary opera on Friday or Sunday. 

“I’ve always felt like the Lobero is Santa Barbara’s community stage,” Clark said. “We try to be the place where a new dream can be born…. It feels very Lobero that everything was able to just fall into place.”

Right down the block, the Alhecama Theatre was built in 1925 for the Santa Barbara School for the Arts, where residents could take classes at little or no cost. “It was a real hub for the arts in Santa Barbara in the early ’20s,” said Anne Peterson, executive director of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. “It’s got this really long, continuous history of artistic uses.” 

The Alhecama was purchased by the State of California in 1982, becoming a part of El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park.

The Trust, which operates El Presidio, began restoring the theater in the 2000s. After restoration was completed, the city designated it as a historic landmark in 2015.

It’s not much to look at from the outside, Peterson acknowledged. But the inside is beautiful, with original oak floors, a stage, and a mural by American artist Ross Dickenson. Never judge a book by its cover, right?

“We really had to advocate for it to be designated as a landmark,” Peterson explained. “A landmark is usually designated based on its exterior. But it can also be tied to its significance to the local community and the history of the building — and that’s why it got listed.”

After restoring the old theater, the Trust reopened it as a community space. It’s used for everything from rehearsals, to lectures, film screenings, dance performances, and now the literary festival. 

The festival fits in with the theater’s legacy of community use and supporting the arts in general, Peterson added. “Historic preservation can really create a lot of positive change — it’s not just about trying to prevent things from changing.”

Alhecama will be hosting festival events on both Saturday and Sunday, including a forum on “Women Climbing to the Top of their Profession,” a keynote by American writer Kim Michele Richardson, a crime panel, and a middle-grade author panel.

Other notable venues include La Arcada Plaza, the Kimpton Canary Hotel, Karpeles Manuscript Library, and the Community Environmental Council Hub — weaving the festival into the fabric of downtown Santa Barbara.

At a time when Santa Barbara’s downtown identity has been in question, the hope is that the festival will embrace its cultural roots as it writes its future. 

The Santa Barbara Literary Festival takes place from May 2 to 3 throughout downtown Santa Barbara. Several of the events (including children’s programming) are free, and the entire event is free for first responders. See santabarbaraliteraryfestival.org/workshops for additional details and to purchase tickets.