Pinky and the Sacramento Theater Company

I was friends with a lot of theater kids growing up and owing to their training in the art of drama, my friends could put on quite the production when talking about the ghosts of the Sacramento Theater Company.

The Sacramento Theater Company was Sacramento's oldest surviving theater company–was, because sadly, it ceased operations in 2024 and passed its campus over to Broadway Sacramento in 2026. Originally founded in 1942 as the Sacramento Civic Repertory Theater, the Sacramento Theater Company's first theater was built in 1949, exactly one hundred years after Sacramento and California's first permanent theater, the Eagle Theater, was raised on Front Street. Fittingly, the Sacramento Theater Company's own theater of canvas and wood was named the Eaglet Theater.

The current campus at 14th and H Street is haunted by five, six, some say as many as seven ghosts. Of those many spirits, the real crowd pleaser and my personal favorite is Pinky.

Some details about Pinky change depending on who you ask. Nobody, for example, seems to agree on Pinky's gender or job. One friend told me about a Pinky that was a negligent stagehand and that he died after not properly securing a sandbag. A different friend insisted that since Pinky is so often spotted in the costume room, she must have been a seamstress. Another friend said that Pinky was an anxious stage manager who died because he said the name of the Scottish play. Yet another friend told me Pinky was an actress and she died because someone wished her good luck.

But regardless of Pinky's gender or occupation, one thing everyone agrees on is that Pinky... is pink.

Often seen in the form of a pink orb, Pinky's fame eclipses that of the other ghosts of the Sacramento Theater Company. Perhaps some of the stories about Pinky are actually stories about the other spirits that still linger in the theater: the doomed lovers, the mischievous stagehand, the opera singer, the tall guy with a mustache, and of course, the somber, failed actress that appears in mirrors in the dressing rooms.

This actress might be a misidentified Pinky, but she is often said to be the Polish-American actress Madame Modjeska. However, Madame Modjeska aka Helena Modjeska was far from a failed actress, in fact she was the most distinguished 19th century Shakespearean actress in the US, and she died in Southern California in 1908, quite far from Sacramento and long before the Sacramento Theater Company was established. To be fair, maybe her ghost heard that Sacramento was a great place to be dead and depressed and so she made the long trek.

Although the campus is no longer the Sacramento Theater Company, the ghosts don't seem to notice the difference. As long as there's a production for the stage, they all know they have a part in keeping the show going. Just as the ghosts of eras past never truly stay dead, the Sacramento Theater Company lives on through the Sacramento Theater Company Foundation, supporting theater arts education to help the next generation of theater kids hone their craft and tell their friends all about Pinky.