Happy 2017! I spent the last year in the theatre trenches producing, promoting, directing and even acting in festivals, community theatre and Off Off Broadway. I also saw a lot of shows. Some were single performances that were self-produced. Some were short runs produced by a theatre company. Some were even shows that do the festival circuit. I was able to connect to many artists and learn about why they created work beyond Broadway.
This month’s column is dedicated to theatre/theater companies who are creating, inspiring and pursuing theatre with a message. If you are in New York or visiting, visit their sites for their show schedule.
Theater 2020, Inc., Visions for a New Millennium
Mission: Theater 2020, Inc., Visions for a New Millennium, is dedicated to producing classic and contemporary plays and musicals for a 21st Century audience and to providing a nurturing atmosphere for both emerging artists and seasoned professionals. They are dedicated to reaching out to the community and to producing quality theater at affordable prices, utilizing established professionals and fostering young artists as they emerge into the theatrical mainstream, with a particular emphasis on providing more opportunities for women in theater. 
About: Brooklyn Heights’ first professional theater company was founded in 2010 and represents the natural culmination of many years in the performing arts by its Producing Artistic Directors, Judith Jarosz and David Fuller, and its board members. Jarosz has performed, directed, choreographed or produced on Broadway and off, at major regional houses, and the New York City Opera. In her years at the helm of Theater Ten Ten Jarosz produced 49 main stage productions, together with countless cabarets, workshops, readings and special events. Fuller has acted nationwide, directed regionally and in NYC, and his 25-plus years in theater includes six years at the helm of Off Broadway’s Jean Cocteau Repertory, as well as seasons in partnership with Jarosz at Theater Ten Ten. All told, Fuller has produced 63 Off Broadway and NYC Indie Theatre productions, in addition to staged reading and music series, workshops and educational outreach programs. Also, since 2001, they have together or singularly produced tours of 21 plays and musicals. They have been recognized with multiple awards and nominations from many institutions including, The National GLADD awards, OOBR Awards, Nytheatre.com People of the Year, and New York Innovative Theater Awards. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen their work, children, students, adults and seniors.
The only professional union theater company based in Brooklyn Heights, Theater 2020 produces everything from classic theater to contemporary satire, with forays into musicals and light opera, making them immediate to modern audiences using both innovative and traditional approaches. They believe live performance is a vital part of a healthy culture and that it is through theater that audiences are engaged dynamically in today’s issues and in perpetual questions of the human condition.
Through their many audience outreach programs,they offer free and deeply discounted tickets because they believe theater must be for everyone, and no one should be deprived of the experience due to economic status. Through our educational initiatives we are firmly committed to the idea that today’s youth is tomorrow’s audience, and they work with educators to provide opportunities for students as interns and assistants.
Theater 2020, Inc. produces in Brooklyn, Manhattan and elsewhere, including the under-served Greene County in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
Mission: The Gallery Players’ mission is to provide the Brooklyn Community with professional-quality theater at an affordable cost, to nurture and support theater artists, and to cultivate an appreciation of theater in future generations. Its eclectic programming of intimate revivals and ambitious new work in inventive productions has earned it the reputation of “New York’s Best Kept Secret.” Among its famous alumni are founding member Harvey Fierstein; Broadway regulars Nancy Anderson, Jeffry Denman, and Diedre Goodwin; New York theater personality Seth Rudetsky; and many others.
About: The Gallery Players has provided Brooklyn audiences with quality theater since 1967. Located in Park Slope but beloved on both sides of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Gallery Players is dedicated to producing classic and contemporary plays and musicals as well as premiering new works. Recipient of the Off-Off Broadway Review’s 2000 Award for Lifetime Achievement, the 2013 Leonard da Vinci Award from the Beaux Arts Society, and the New York Innovative Theatre Awards for outstanding musical for Urinetown, Yank, and Like You Like It. The Gallery Players’ season comprises three plays and three musicals, covering a remarkably wide range of dramatic and comedic styles. The season finale is the annual Black Box New Play Festival, which gives premiere performances of new works by playwrights.
Gallery Players resides in a 99-seat theater in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Gallery’s reputation, critical acclaim, and popularity among audiences and artists puts it in an enviable position among its volunteer-only and Off-Off Broadway comparables.
Mission: They draw on Federico Garcia Lorca´s concept of “DUENDE” to produce plays infused with a “PRIMITIVE GRACE”, in order to shift the audience´s paradigm so they will experience reality in a new, profound life altering way. 
IN LORCA’S CONCEPT OF DUENDE, AT LEAST FOUR ELEMENTS CAN BE ISOLATED:
(1) IRRATIONALITY
(2) EARTHINESS
(3) A HEIGHTENED AWARENESS OF DEATH
(4) A DASH OF THE DIABOLICAL.
According to Lorca DUENDE is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.
About: Primitive Grace is a New York City based Theater Ensemble producing original & established, classic & contemporary plays designed to create a shift in the audience´s paradigm of reality to allow Duende to take over.
Primitive Grace’s Co-Artistic Directors are Paul Calderon and David Zayas.
Mission: THE DIRTY BLONDES are a feminist theater company with a taste for provocation. Their mission is to produce theater that furthers the right conversation at the right time with the right people. Through this mission, artists are responsible for using their work to participate in a dialogue that bears on their experience and pushes the conversation further – creating stark, challenging and emotional truthful pieces of theater.
About: Founded in Brooklyn in 2012, The Dirty Blondes have produced 15 works of new theater featuring the talent of more than 340 artists (through mainstage productions, beta readings and Play in a Day Festivals) willing to use the stage to create visually stunning and emotionally truthful pieces of theater and to highlight the importance of political and social advocacy. Winners of Overall Excellence in Playwriting at FringeNYC (2015) for The American Play, which was also extended Off-Broadway at SoHo Playhouse. Productions by The Dirty Blondes have been declared “A phenomenal, important piece of theatre” by the Fringe Review (The Tunnel Play), and “Raw, contemporary and edgy” by StageBuddy (The American Play).
A feminist theater company with a taste for provocation.
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