In 2019, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley had just won theRegional Theatre Tony Awardand was planning to send its founder,Robert Kelley,into retirement after a 50-year tenure that built the Bay Area’s third-largest nonprofit theater company from scratch.

Four years later, it’s now started an emergency fundraising campaign, Save TheatreWorks Now, which seeks to raise $3 million by November to complete the company’s2023-24 season.

If the company doesn’t reach its goal, its future is uncertain. But Artistic Director Giovanna Sardelli — who’s been at the helm only a few weeks, following the departure of her predecessorTim Bond to Oregon Shakespeare Festival— remains steadfast.

“I’m not even entertaining that as a possibility,” she said. “I have such faith that we will not only survive, but we will thrive.”

Already this summer, TheatreWorks had postponed its 2022-23 season closer, the world premiere of “Alice Bliss,” citingdeclining subscriber numbers.Board member and outgoing board chair Holly Ward now reports that the company is projecting $8 million in expenses and $5 million in income this year.

“We’ve done as much cost-cutting as we can,” Ward said. As one example, Sardelli is still performing her old job duties as director of new works on top of her new ones.

The stunning change of fortune, which TheatreWorks announced Wednesday, Aug. 9, is hardly unique. Theaters locally and across the country are laying off staff, shedding programming or closing altogether in response to pandemic aftershocks, especially ongoing inflation,stubbornly low attendanceand tapped-out COVID-era government support.

Many have also launched urgent philanthropic drives this year similar to Save TheatreWorks Now. Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s campaign was successful, hitting its $2.5 million goal within 50 days, according to Interim Executive Director Tyler Hokama.Bay Area Children’s Theatre’swas not, leading the 19-year-old company to close permanently less than three weeks after announcing its need to筹集750000美元。

“Whether publicly or privately, every conversation I have with any artistic director, except for a very small handful, is, ‘Oh, God, what are we going to do? Are we going to make it? ’ So I think it is brave to be open about it,” said San Francisco playwright Lauren Gunderson, whose“Silent Sky”was produced by TheatreWorks in 2014. A campaign such as TheatreWorks’ or OSF’s, she added, “allows people like me to go, ‘OK, got it. We are in power mode. We’ve got to save this company.”

But even if TheatreWorks isn’t alone, its challenges are sobering, saddening and — many hope — galvanizing. As a pillar of Bay Area theater, TheatreWorks is a longtime practitioner of color-conscious casting, an educator of generations of children, the birthplace of countless careers (a youngZendayaperformed there) and new plays, and a vital counter to the narrative that the only export to come out of Silicon Valley is tech.

“TheatreWorks是伟大的实验室之一for new works in this country,” said Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie Award-winning playwright Rajiv Joseph, who’s had three shows produced on the company’s main stage; he’s also appearing at a fundraiser on Friday, Aug. 11, as part of the company’s New Works Festival. “There’s a lot of theaters that do development, but they don’t have the track record of TheatreWorks of actually bringing those works to fully realized productions.”

A longtime participant in TheatreWorks’ New Works Festival, Joseph also praised TheatreWorks audiences. Their comments to him as he workshopped “The North Pool” there were “really useful to me,” he said. In 2012, that script went on to win the prestigiousWill Glickman Awardfor the best play to premiere in the Bay Area.

Gunderson,whom American Theatre magazine has twice named the nation’s most-produced playwright, said TheatreWorks’ production of her “Silent Sky” was instrumental in her career.

“That is the production that confirmed to me the things I knew to be true about the play were true,” she said.

Now that script gets mounted all the time, including this summer atSPARC Theaterin Livermore.

“我认为我们l, as theater artists, looking down the barrel of a gun,” Joseph said, reflecting on the industry nationwide. “It underscores what’s always been a sad state for this country, which is that our arts programs rely on the kindness of others.”

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com