Our Team
Founder & Co-Artistic Director
Sam Gibbs
Sam Gibbs dreamed up space-adventurous classics theatre company Stairwell Theater in 2015. He is guided by a simple belief: theatre should be an adventure.
Coming from an artistic family — his father and grandmother were both ballet dancers — Sam grew up surrounded by the magic of live performance. What enchanted him most wasn’t just what happened on stage, but everything around it: the opera house lights, the scent of Christmas decorations in the lobby, the fog rolling in off San Francisco Bay. Those sensory details shaped his conviction that theater is more than words and actions — it’s an environmental experience.
For Sam, a great play doesn’t simply tell a story; it transports you. It begins the moment you arrive and lingers long after you leave. Through Stairwell Theater, he creates all-encompassing events that awaken every sense — sight, sound, smell, and even touch — inviting audiences to experience a story rather than merely watch it.
Sam sees theater as an act of openness: of letting the world in, rather than shutting it out. His goal is for audiences to leave changed — spiritually, physically, and emotionally — by the stories they’ve shared.
Sam studied directing and acting at UCLA and LAMDA, and earned his MFA in Directing from Columbia University, where he studied under Anne Bogart and Brian Kulick. He has collaborated with Mabou Mines, Anonymous Ensemble, and Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco, and completed directing internships with Kenny Leon Productions and Double Edge Theater in Massachusetts.
Through Stairwell, Sam creates theatrical events that celebrate the beauty of nature, the unpredictability of space, and the power of imagination to transform how we experience the world.
Co-Artistic Director
Rebecca Tyree Gibbs
Rebecca Tyree Gibbs is a bicoastal experimental artist, actor, and co-Artistic Director of Stairwell Theater, where she serves as both lead performer and creator. Her work bridges the natural and theatrical worlds — drawing inspiration from trees, bees, soil, and sky — to remind audiences of their connection to the living environment around them.
When Rebecca moved to New York, she was drawn to experimental performance because she longed to evoke in audiences the same awe she felt hiking eleven miles to the top of a mountain. To her, theater and nature are twin realms of intensity — places where human beings encounter magnitude, vulnerability, and wonder.
Rebecca’s process embraces authenticity and the raw materials of the world — driving to the coast to collect driftwood for a prop, or covering herself in mud for a performance. She believes in literally growing stages, cultivating work that is alive, organic, and responsive to its surroundings.
Her artistic practice is also grounded in a belief that artmaking should decolonize. She invites audiences to engage with the land beneath them and to feel the presence of the people who cared for it before us. Each performance becomes a kind of time travel, opening a fourth and fifth dimension of experience — one that’s physical, spiritual, and deeply human.
Rebecca has collaborated with Mabou Mines, The Wooster Group, and Advanced Beginner Group, and extends deep gratitude to Polina Klimovitskaya for her artistic mentorship.