At 75 Woodbury Boulevard, near High Falls, Geva Theatre Center greets you. This is the regional, not-for-profit, professional theatre company based here in Rochester, housed in a building dating to 1868 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. From this corner you’re close to a place that mounts full seasons of programming, then stays after the curtain with discussions based on plays, staged readings, and community outreach that invite the city in.
The company you see here grew from modest roots: in 1972 William Markham Selden and Cynthia Mason Selden, a British actress and residents of nearby Avon, co-founded GeVa — an abbreviation for “Genesee Valley Arts Foundation. Its first shows were short dramas produced at lunchtime in 1973 at the Rochester Business Institute. Programming soon expanded to full-length plays and the company came to be ranked with regional theatres in Buffalo and Syracuse.
In 1997 the name was changed to Geva Theatre Center, dropping the CamelCase, and in 2011 it hosted the American Association of Community Theatre Festival. By 2017 this theatre was recognized as the best-attended in New York State outside New York City. High Falls waits nearby, just past this corner on Woodbury Boulevard.