Venue: Theater for the New City
Town: Manhattan, US

Theater for the New City, founded in 1971 and known familiarly as TNC, is one of New York City's leading off-off-Broadway theaters, known for radical political plays and community commitment. Productions at TNC have won 43 Obie Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. TNC currently exists as a 4-theater complex in a 30,000-square-foot (2,800 m2) space at 155 First Avenue, in the East Village of Manhattan. Crystal Field and George Bartenieff founded Theater for the New City in 1971 with Theo Barnes and Lawrence Kornfeld, who was the Resident Director of Judson Poets Theatre, where the four had met. Feeling that Judson Poets Theatre had peaked, they decided to form a theater of their own for poetic work that would also encompass a community ideal. The impulse to form a company coincided with the availability of a space at the Westbeth Artists Community in the West Village. Bartenieff, Field, Barnes and Kornfeld named their new company "Theater for the New City" after a speech in which then-mayor John V. Lindsay envisioned a "new city" for all. The theater officially opened in March 1971. Its initial two seasons included plays by Richard Foreman, Charles Ludlam, Miguel Piñero and Jean-Claude van Itallie. Theater for the New City also began its Annual Summer Street Theater, and founded the Village Halloween Parade with puppeteer Ralph Lee. The Parade won an Obie Award under TNC administration, but a desire to be much more commercially viable than TNC's anti-establishment spirit would allow caused Ralph Lee to form his own Parade Committee and split from TNC in 1973. TNC subsequently inaugurated its Village Halloween Costume Ball, which it still holds to this day. TNC saw some major changes in its first year. Kornfeld and Barnes resigned, leaving Bartenieff as Executive Director and Field as Artistic Director. TNC also moved from Westbeth Artists Community and found a new home in the Jane West, a former seaman's hotel at 113 Jane Street, in a run-down area of the West Vi