A Vagabond Troupe Gets Its First Home
I had the pleasure of attending the ribbon-cutting for the new permanent home for Theatre For a New Audience, the only American Shakespeare Company to be invited, and reinvited, by the Royal Shakespeare Company to perform in London. TFANA’s path to its glorious new theatre adjacent to the Brooklyn Academy of Music was many years in the coming. New York City, under Mayor Bloomberg, contributed $34.5 million of the $70 total cost.
ARA was there in the beginning to validate the feasibility of the company moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn. In 2001, Jeffery Horowitz, TFANA’s Executive Director, retained ARA to measure potential loss in its current Manhattan audience against an increase from a rapidly developing new Brooklyn. Based on hundreds of audience interviews and several focus groups, we concluded that the move would result in a net increase in total audience.
We recommended that TFANA build the new theatre as part of the BAM Cultural District which the City had targeted for economic development. The research unearthed the additional benefit that the audience was very receptive to TFANA building a permanent home because theatre companies that moved frequently worried and annoyed them. In contrast, companies that had a permanent base of operation allowed them to feel as if they belonged.
Theatre for a New Audience opens its new home with a new $2.4 million production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream directed by Julie Taymor, whose work the company goes back 30 years. Opening night is November 2.