BROOKLYN, N.Y.: Jeffrey Horowitz, founder and artistic director of Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA), has announced that he will leave the post and retire on Aug. 31, 2025, at the end of TFANA’s just-announced 2024-25 season, which includes Shakespeare alongside plays by classical and contemporary playwrights.
Said Horowitz, who founded TFANA in 1979, in a statement, “Some of what I got to do at Theatre for a New Audience was build an artistic home and support, risk, produce, provoke, entertain, explore, educate, illuminate, reach, challenge the status quo, and inquire. It’s been 45 curious and extraordinary years. Others now should have the opportunity to shape the next era of TFANA’s development.”
After training as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), Horowitz moved to New York and performed on and Off-Broadway in plays by Arnold Wesker and Wallace Shawn. At the time there few opportunities in the U.S. to be a member of a classical company along the lines of the U.K.’s Royal Shakespeare Company. So, with $50,000 that Horowitz won in a lawsuit after being injured in an accidental fire in his apartment, he founded Theatre for a New Audience, which he later called “one of the best decisions I ever made.”
Horowitz’s vison for TFANA was to build a modern classical theatre in New York dedicated to the language and ideas of authors, with Shakespeare as house playwright produced alongside classic and contemporary dramatists. Seventeen years later, TFANA had an annual budget of $2 million, and Horowitz worked closely with TFANA Chair Theodore C. Rogers and the organization’s board to launch a capital campaign to fund a permanent home. It took another 17 years, but in October 2013, TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center opened in Brooklyn, built in partnership with the City of New York on a city-owned former parking lot and designed by Hugh Hardy and H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture.
Another major effort by Horowitz was developing artistic relationships between TFANA and the RSC. Horowitz first invited Cicely Berry, the RSC’s director of voice, to lead Shakespeare workshops at TFANA for actors and directors. In 2001, TFANA became the first American theatre company invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the RSC, with Bartlett Sher’s staging of Cymbeline. In 2007, the RSC asked TFANA to return as part of the Complete Works Festival with The Merchant of Venice, staring F. Murray Abraham as Shylock and directed by Darko Tresnjak.
In 2014, Michael Boyd, former artistic director, RSC, adapted and directed Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great starring John Douglas Thompson at TFANA. Commented Thompson in a statement, “Under Jeffrey Horowitz’s leadership, TFANA has proved an essential artistic home for me. Jeffrey hired me when I couldn’t find acting work and offered me guidance, counsel, and most importantly my shot at some of the great iconic roles of the classical canon. From Shakespeare to Marlowe to Ibsen, our artistic collaboration has been an almost two-decade journey, forging me a career and allowing me to dance on the edge of my craft.”
This season, TFANA and Horowitz will continue its transatlantic work when it takes its production of The Merchant of Venice, staged by TFANA resident director Arin Arbus and starring Thompson, to Scotland as part of the Shakespeare Exchange with the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh.
Said playwright Richard Nelson in a statement, “TFANA holds to the belief that new plays and old plays must go hand in hand. The one needs the other to grow. Without classics new plays are out of context, out of any sense of tradition; that is, out of history. And without new plays alongside, the classics are lost to the past, instead of being in conversation with today.” Added director Julie Taymor in a statement, “It was Jeffrey Horowitz who first lured me into directing Shakespeare. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the Bard’s work, but Jeffrey helped me get beyond the intimidating prospect of all those words. He opened the door. He was a wonderful producer, encouraging experimentation, supporting collaboration with artists far and wide and raising funds for the ideas and artists he believed in. His excitement was pivotal to my enjoyment of the process. We did The Tempest twice, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and the opening production of the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, A Midsummer Night’s Dream…It has been the honor of a lifetime to have been produced by Theatre for a New Audience under the superb leadership of Jeffrey Horowitz.”
TFANA’s board has authorized a search committee to find a replacement, and retained Arts Consulting Group to conduct the parallel search for a new artistic director and new executive director.
Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is a New York home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. As of 2023, its budget was $7.8 million.
