A Legacy a Century in the Making
Theatre Cedar Rapids
Founded in 1925 in Grant Wood's studio, TCR has grown into Iowa's largest nonprofit producing theater and one of the nation's leading professionally run community theaters. Today, we welcome tens of thousands of patrons, artsists, students, and volunteers each year to our home in the historic Iowa Theatre Building in downtown Cedar Rapids.
Guided by our mission to captivate and inspire through the theatrical and performing arts, TCR produces bold, engaging work across two performance spaces: The 550-seat auditorium and the intimate 85-seat Grandon Studio Theatre. Beyond the stage, our education and engagement programs serve learners of all ages, nurturing creativity, confidence, and connection.
As a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, TCR exists to serve our community—not only as an entertainment destination, but as a place of belonging, learning, and shared experience. Our vision is to be a cultural point of pride, connection, inclusion, and learning, invigorating growth throughout our region.
Whether you join us in the audience, onstage, backstage, in the classroom, or as a supporter, you are part of the story we continue to build together.
Our Home: The Iowa Theatre Building
Our Mission
Our Vision
Our Values
Theatre is life-changing.
Theatre creates joy, sparks relationships, cultivates empathy, and deepens our collective understanding of our shared humanity.
Extraordinary begets extraordinary.
We hold ourselves to the highest professional standards and challenge one another to do our best work—onstage, offstage, and in service to our community.
Equity, inclusion, safety, and access are our shared responsibility.
We actively welcome all to join our mission and are committed to fostering physically and emotionally safe spaces. We listen, learn, and evolve, working to address inequities through policies and practices that are pro-equity, anti-racist, and inclusive.
Arts education builds stronger minds and communities.
By embracing STEAM education, we help students develop confidence, compassion, creativity, and essential life skills that extend far beyond the stage.
We are caretakers of TCR’s legacy.
We honor our history while investing responsibly in the future—stewarding a 100-year-old institution and an iconic downtown building for generations to come.
Who We Serve
TCR is the largest non-profit producing theatre company in Iowa, and sets industry standards both locally and nationally.
TCR welcomes over 50,000 visitors annually and can draw anywhere from 20 to 750 people downtown on any given day. This includes patrons, performers, students, community members, artists, musicians, and more. TCR visitors represent over 300 individual communities and have come from as far as New York, Florida, and Texas.
Our team is comprised of 18 full-time staff members, over a dozen part-time staff members, and hundreds of contracted artists, musicians, and designers.
The education program at TCR has grown exponentially over the last three years. We are projecting to have over 1,000 students attend our theatre arts education camps in the summer of 2024.
