Mission & Vision

ZACH's Mission Statement

ZACH creates intimate theatre that ignites the imagination, lifts the spirit, and engages our community.

ZACH Theatre's Vision

ZACH Theatre is the place where our diverse, energized community gathers for a collective imaginative journey.

Artistic Excellence & Integrity

We strive for the highest artistic excellence with each show we produce and curate our seasons thoughtfully with work that reflects the core values of our vision.  We believe originality is worth the risk of failure, and we seek to create theatre that enables our audience to see things anew.  ZACH incubates original work by cultivating, commissioning, developing and producing new plays and musicals by playwrights and composers from our region and our nation. A title on our season may be familiar, but the production itself is not, as our artists create interpretations based on their own creative impulses.  The number one thing our audiences tell us they love about ZACH is that it is intimate.  Audience members are in close physical proximity to the actors on our stages making the live experience immediate, visceral and vital. Consequently, we strive to build connections to the powerful states of emotional, intellectual and spiritual intimacy that our work promotes.

Inclusive

We desire a dialogue that is inclusive. We love learning from other voices and other perspectives because they enrich our imagination in ways we could not imagine, and enable us to become more compassionate and thoughtful people. We see theatre as the place where all liberties are possible for all people. We believe theatre offers an avenue for self-examination, an arena in which we might be challenged to understand a little better not just our own lives, but the world in which we live.  ZACH commits to provide opportunities for all artists to participate fully in the artistic process and to erase the labels we can use to separate ourselves like race, gender, sexual orientation, and economic or social class.

Transformative

We initiate personal transformation.  As actors transform on-stage before our audience’s eyes, our intent is that the audience has been engaged in an experience that carries the tools for personal change on some level. Sometimes this is simply about changing a person’s day, transforming a bad day at the office or a hard day at home with entertainments that provide escape and laughter.  At other times this is about offering an alternative point of view to create change in attitudes, perceptions or beliefs about other people in our community or on our planet.  We believe artistically ambitious theatre must also entertain, and we revel in aesthetically rigorous work that is fun and irreverent.  We gravitate to stories that offer hope, and powerful moments of truth that reconnect us to that which imbues our life with meaning.

Collaborative

We stimulate new ideas, while pushing the boundaries of our artistic exploration, by keeping artistic collaboration at the epicenter of what we do.  Our productions are richer from the full participation of the artistic and technical teams assembled on each show contributing to the final work on stage.  Likewise partnerships with artists outside of our primary discipline and persons who create work in completely different ways from our normal process renews our perspective and sparks our creativity. At ZACH we use our rehearsal room collaborations to inform how we work together internally as a staff and Board of Directors, and externally how we invite our subscribers, patrons, donors, corporate friends, parents, teachers, and other community stakeholders to participate.

Life Long Learning

We nurture today for tomorrow.  We engage youth in theatre training that empowers them to unleash their imaginations and access their own artistic expression and aesthetic development.  For some students this manifests in acquiring life skills, like greater self-confidence, stronger public speaking and higher self-esteem.  Other students interested in the development of their artistic pre-professional skills engage in sequential curriculum designed to grow their artistry.  We build an audience for theatre in the future by cultivating educational opportunities for students to study, explore and experience the joys of live theatre as an audience member and as a participant on stage.  We also create plays for children as the intended audience, emphasizing stories that celebrate our differences and promote inclusiveness, and that possess characters who transform themselves to reach their greatest potential. Post-performance audience talkbacks, special production preview symposia conducted by the artistic production teams, invited panel dialogues, and dramaturgical production-specific newsletters provide adults with an invitation to stay active, engaged and learning.

Austintatious!

We create plays and musicals that inspire Austin, and are inspired by Austin. We engage our city in a lively, meaningful dialogue to cultivate a greater sense of community for everyone who calls Austin home. We relish the opportunity to engage Central Texas in a collective imaginative act.  We commit to hiring actors, designers, directors, musicians, designers, artists and technicians primarily from our region. Austin’s vibrant, nationally acclaimed live music scene figures prominently in our work and in the musicals we produce.  We are in the heart of Austin’s “creative class” and we celebrate what makes each of us unique.  Like Austin, we are progressive, optimistic, ambitious, and growing rapidly while preserving what makes ZACH singular.  We envision ZACH as the meeting tent where our community gathers because it has investment, ownership and representation.  Voices are lifted.  Souls ascend.  And the light burns bright.

Please click here for ZACH's Board of Directors.