About the Nonprofit
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Since 1967, TheaterWorksUSA (TWUSA) has created exceptional, transformative, accessible theatrical experiences for youth and family audiences in diverse communities throughout New York City and North America. For nearly six decades, we have been a trailblazer in the not-for-profit theater industry, leading the evolution of theater for young audiences as an art form and building a repertoire of more than 140 literature and history-based plays and musicals. We are proud to say that we bring our productions to 440 cities throughout the nation annually; and nearly 100 million children, educators, and families have joined us at the theater to enjoy titles ranging from classics like Charlotte’s Web to contemporary favorites like Dog Man: The Musical, The Lightning Thief, and Pete the Cat’s Big Hollywood Adventure!
Our programming is designed to address the inequity of arts access for young people across the country. We work especially hard to ensure that our programming is accessible to children and families in our hometown, New York City, where prohibitively high-ticket prices keep many families from engaging with the city’s cultural offerings. We keep our ticket prices low – an average of $11.00 – and distribute close to 30,000 free and subsidized tickets every year.
As TWUSA continues to emerge from the considerable challenges of the pandemic, we endeavor to regain the momentum we built during our 2019-2020 season by resuming our signature programs while also launching new initiatives in response to our changing world. Accordingly, in 2022-2023, our core artistic programming will include:
National Tours of our original plays and musicals for young and family audiences. Before COVID, our tours performed more than 1,500 times annually, reaching nearly 1.5 million children, educators, and families across 49 states.
Family Summer Theater (FST), our hometown program provides accessible live theater to children and family audiences throughout all five boroughs of New York City, often serving as a first-in-a-lifetime exposure to live theater. Tickets to weekday performances are free, with distribution focused on social service groups and education programs. Partnerships for FST include NYC’s Department of Youth and Community Development, BronxWorks, the YMCA, Children’s Aid Society, and more. In 2022, with support from the Miranda Family Foundation, FST presented TWUSA’s first bilingual musical, El Otro Oz. El Otro Oz, described in detail in the paragraphs hereinbelow, played 11 free performances in multicultural spaces across New York City’s five boroughs.
New Work Development, an initiative designed to expand and elevate the theater-for-young-audiences canon. We partner with emerging playwrights and composers to create high-caliber productions that speak to audience members at various stages of their educational, socio-emotional, and artistic development. We continue to develop new work that moves beyond a traditional model of adapting popular children’s stories, commissioning and premiering work on diverse themes that encourage empathy, empowerment, and hope.
Furthermore, the entirety of TWUSA’s work is based in arts education.
TWUSA’s approach is guided by the understanding that quality arts programming is not just an investment in the future of our young audiences–as potential arts patrons, citizens, and leaders–but an investment in their here and now, meeting their social and emotional needs at all stages of development. By bringing our productions to school and family audiences, as well as reducing financial barriers for attendance, we are giving young people the opportunity to practice their creativity, critical thinking skills, and emotional literacy in ways that have not been available to them since before the pandemic.
Our theater work prioritizes the experience and perspective of children and respects their honesty and intelligence. Productions often feature current events, historical figures, and complex real-life issues, serving as catalysts for important conversations between young people and the adults in their lives. By utilizing theater as a means to discuss big and challenging ideas, TWUSA encourages young people to be engaged and inquisitive about their world.
To that end, we offer comprehensive Arts Enhancement Educational Programs, which provide educators and caregivers with free, show-specific study guides and other materials to support those conversations through classroom instruction in language arts, social studies, and STEM subjects. We also provide talk-back sessions with performers to help audience members explore a production’s subject matter, make cross-curricular connections, and reflect on how the performance relates to their own lives. These initiatives enhance the impact our shows have on young people while also providing tools and support to educators who may have little arts-specific training or resources.
TW USA’s education programs are designed to accomplish many of the same things our live performances have done for more than half a century: build community, foster creativity, encourage literacy, and instill a love for theater arts in young people. All TWUSA theater classes are skill-based and focus on self-expression and ensemble-building activities through involvement in the arts. Additionally, all of our programs reinforce the Four Cs of 21st Century Learning: Creativity; Critical Thinking; Communication; and Collaboration and meet Common Core ELA Literacy Standards and National Core Arts Anchor Standards in Theatre/Creating and Theatre/Performing.