Theatre for a New Audience

Theatre for a New Audience is a Brooklyn-based company built around classic drama, especially Shakespeare, performed with an eye toward making the language and ideas accessible to audiences seeing it for the first time. It performs at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, a purpose-built theater in Fort Greene, and its productions tend to be text-focused, thoughtfully directed takes on canonical plays. It's a strong choice for a first Shakespeare experience or for seasoned theatergoers who want a serious, well-considered classic play.

Theatre for a New Audience was founded in 1979 with a mission to produce classic drama, principally Shakespeare, in ways that would be genuinely accessible to audiences new to the plays, including extensive educational programming for students. For its first several decades, it operated without a permanent home, producing at various theaters around New York.

The company built strong partnerships with New York City public schools, bringing large numbers of students to see professionally mounted productions of Shakespeare and other classic plays, often for the first time. In 2013 it opened the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, its first permanent home and one of relatively few American theaters purpose-built for classical repertoire.

Theatre for a New Audience continues to focus on Shakespeare and other classic plays, paired with an extensive education program, from its Brooklyn home. The Polonsky Shakespeare Center's flexible seating and thrust stage were designed specifically to bring audiences physically closer to classical text than a traditional proscenium theater allows. That closeness, combined with the company's long-running student matinee program, means a single week's audience there can range from first-time teenage theatergoers to lifelong Shakespeare devotees seeing the same production.