Mission
For 25 years TACT articulated its vision as follows: TACT is a company of theatre artists that reveals, reclaims, and reimagines great plays of literary merit, creating an intimate theatre experience for its audience by focusing on the text and the actor’s ability to bring it to life.
History
TACT’s founding company of actors was first drawn together in 1992 by a love of the literature of the theatre. Over 25 seasons and 200+ productions, TACT added actors, as well as directors, designers, composers, stage managers and technicians to its ranks, growing to become a true ensemble: developing a common vocabulary and a performance technique based on a shared artistic vision that the actor and the word be the main feature of a theatrical/performance event, and a collective body of work. At the close of the 2018 season there were a total of 55 active company members, adjunct company members, and administrators. TACT’s company of professional theatre artists are veterans of the stage, film, and television whose cumulative experience includes scores of Broadway shows, hundreds of Off-Broadway plays, thousands of regional theatre productions, and countless films, television shows and webseries. These artists committed to TACT because of the artistic opportunities offered: an artistic home, creative challenges, professional growth, and the chance to work on great plays that deserved to be seen more often in New York City.
From the compelling poetic language of Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale to the ironic subversive wit of Vaclav Havel’s The Memorandum, the plays TACT presented were propelled by language and ideas. Whether American farce or English drama, Italian satire or Russian tragedy, TACT’s work explored the eternal truths of the human condition. Time and again, TACT’s audiences discovered how a well-written, well-executed play, of any age, can produce both the joy and discomfort of recognition. Whether taking us to the darkest corners of the soul or the highest reaches of the human spirit, these plays ultimately enrich, involve, and entertain.
Thanks to a company of actors of prodigious talent and depth, TACT presented plays that the commercial theatre often finds daunting. Large-cast productions such as Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, or challenging texts such as William Inge’s Natural Affection, seldom find their way onto the contemporary professional stage.
From the beginning, TACT made its reputation with its Concert Performance productions: fully rehearsed presentations stripped down to their essence. Staged in our intimate studio space, these performances (eventually renamed the Salon Series) featured simple staging, costuming, and lighting, focusing the emphasis of the drama away from spectacle and production, and back to the words and the actor – creating theatre in its purest form. This style grew out of the belief that the true magic of theatre lies in the special connection between the artist, the work of art, and the fully engaged audience.
For 12 years, TACT was a resident company of NYC’s famed Theatre Row producing their Mainstage, Off-Broadway productions in the Beckett Theatre. TACT’s award-winning productions were frequent New York Times and Wall Street Journal “Critics Picks,” and several were highlighted those papers’ “Best of the Year” reviews.
TACT presented its Salon Series in their studio space at 900 Broadway in the Flatiron district. Both spaces offered audiences an intimate and literally up-close and personal experience with the plays and artists.
In 2012/2013 TACT was honored by being named The Wall Street Journal’s 2012 “Company Of The Year.” In 2016 Our Town press named the company “Best in Manhattan.”
