A barn-style playhouse inside a state historic park hosted one of San Diego's great theatre success stories for seventeen years. The Old Town Theatre at 4040 Twiggs Street - known through that era as Cygnet Theatre - stands in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, the preserved birthplace of California where costumed interpreters work streets frozen in the 1840s-1872 period. The building itself dates to 1979, constructed by the state with funds raised by local actor Polly Puterbaugh after the park's little Mission Playhouse, a 74-seat house tracing back to Edythe Pirazzini's 1957 company, was demolished in 1973. Cygnet Theatre Company arrived in 2008. Founded in 2003 by Bill Schmidt and Sean Murray in a strip-mall space in the Rolando district - the name is a young swan, a nod to the Swan Theatre that rivalled Shakespeare's Globe, and a cheeky challenge to San Diego's Old Globe - the company outgrew its 165-seat original home within five years. It signed a ten-year concession with California State Parks contingent on at least 370,000 dollars of capital improvements, opened with Sondheim's A Little Night Music, and poured a further renovation into the barn that autumn. The 246-seat house became one of the region's most awarded stages: six mainstage productions a year, a heavy share of local and regional premieres balanced with classics and musicals, more than 90 theatre awards in the company's first eight seasons, and some 40,000 patrons annually. Storytelling on the Green, its outdoor education program, performed abridged Shakespeare and A Christmas Carol from a wagon stage on the park lawn for thousands of schoolchildren each year. In September 2025 Cygnet moved to its new purpose-built home, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Performing Arts Center at Arts District Liberty Station, ending the Old Town residency. The Twiggs Street theatre continues as a performance venue for other companies - Opera Neo among the first to book its stage. For visitors, the draw remains the setting: a working theatre embedded in the most-visited state park in California, steps from the plaza, the historic adobes and the restaurants of Old Town, with the trolley's Old Town station a short walk away.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 4040 Twiggs Street, San Diego, CA, United States, 92110

Website: https://cygnettheatre.org

Capacity: 246

Opening Date: 01/01/1979

Accessible