The Old Globe Theatre was built in 1935 for the California Pacific International Exposition as a scaled reproduction of Shakespeare's Elizabethan Globe playhouse, designed for abbreviated fifty-minute Shakespeare performances delivered continuously to fairgoers. Richard S. Requa, the exposition's Director of Architecture, oversaw the construction of the half-timbered, thatched-roof replica, an outlier in his otherwise Spanish and Mediterranean portfolio. Intended for demolition when the fair closed, the building was saved in 1937 by local citizens who organized to preserve it as a permanent theater. On March 8, 1978, an arsonist destroyed the building, the same individual who had set fire to the adjacent Electric Building a month earlier in what became one of the most consequential acts of vandalism in American architectural history.
The theater that stands today was designed by Liebhardt Weston and Associates and reopened in 1982. Rather than a literal reconstruction of the 1935 replica, the new building is a modern theater that evokes Elizabethan form, with a thrust stage and a horseshoe of seating for roughly 580 patrons. The complex now comprises three venues: the Old Globe Theatre itself, the outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre under the eucalyptus trees where the summer Shakespeare season plays, and the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre, an arena stage.
