About ZACH

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ZACH's Mission Statement

The mission of Zachary Scott Theatre Center (ZACH) is to create a unique theatre experience that ignites the imagination lifts the spirit, and creates meaningful dialogue that engages our community. ZACH's season of professional theatre productions celebrates diversity and offers a wide array of cross-cultural educational and participatory activities.

The goals of ZACH's programming is to:

• Foster in Austin a broader, deeper, and more humane thinking and action

• Connect, make meaning and transform society

• Entertain, celebrate, and educate

• Relate to diverse communities

ZACH's Vision Statement

The soul of our city, Zachary Scott Theatre Center, creates art that inspires Austin and is inspired by Austin. We engage our community in a lively, unpredictable dialogue that pulses with the city's booming vitality, stimulating new ideas pushing the boundaries of our artistic exploration. Theatre awakens our soul. We believe theatre offers an avenue for self-examination, an arena in which we might be challenged to understand not just our own lives, but the world in which we live. We relish the opportunity to engage Austin in a collective imaginative act -200 people at a time- in the dark, looking to the light. Our theatre is a spiritual place.

ZACH creates personal transformation. As artists transform on-stage before our audience's eyes, we hope the audience has been engaged in an experience that also carries the tools for personal change. We gravitate to stories which move and lift the soul, singing that makes us "want to jump up and shout" because it is so full of spirit, and powerful moments of truth that help us reconnect to that which imbues our life with meaning. We create provocative conversations that resonate in our community on topics like race, gender, sexuality, freedom, responsibility, and compassion and that continue well after the curtain has come down. We believe artistically ambitious theatre has the greatest responsibility to entertain. Consequently, we revel in aesthetically rigorous work that is fun, playful, entertaining, and irreverent, because life is too short to be serious and too serious to be frivolous.

We believe originality is worth the risk of failure. We create experiences where our audience truly possesses the ability to see things with fresh eyes. We give life to plays that people talk about, study, and love, but are rarely performed in other theatres. ZACH is an incubator of original work, cultivating, commissioning, developing and producing new plays and musicals by playwrights and composers from our region.

A title on our season may be familiar, but the production is not. Just as Aretha Franklin sang of "RE- RE- RE- RE- RE- RE- RE- RE-SPECT", we sing a refrain of "RE-invent, RE -interpret, RE -imagine, RE -envision, RE -discover, RE -newal, RE -vival" in our work, for our artists and for our audience. We create a sense of "event" with innovative plays and musicals given a fresh, unique, wildly theatrical twist that explodes the fourth wall. Our actors are often found in the audience, and our audience is often found on stage. We engage all the senses with innovative concepts and sensuous designs that engulf our audience as a participant in big ideas in our intimate space. We invent large-scale productions with a close physical proximity of audience to the actor, to bridge a connection to the powerful states of emotional and spiritual intimacy, which our work promotes.

AustinÕs vibrant, nationally acclaimed live music scene figures prominently in our work. Our musicals rock, and our plays are often scored with original music. We playfully nod to nostalgia, looking back to look forward. We love an element of surprise. We are progressive, optimistic, and ambitious. With each new production we strive to exceed our audience's expectations, employing a mastery of craft and polish.

We commit to hiring artists primarily from our region. Because we desire a dialogue that is inclusive, ZACH is committed to diversity and to providing opportunities for artists of all races to participate fully in the artistic process. We love learning from other voices and other perspectives because they enrich our imagination and our experience in ways we could not imagine. We see theatre as the place where all liberties are possible for all people.

We commit to nurturing today for tomorrow and building an audience for theatre in the future. We engage youth in theatre training that empowers them to unleash their imaginations, and access their own artistic expression and aesthetic development. We create plays specifically for children as the intended audience, with themes rife with life-affirming and soul-expanding potential. We cultivate educational opportunities for students to study, explore and experience the joys of live theatre.

We envision ZACH as the meeting tent where a diverse, energized community has investment, ownership and representation. And the people gather in celebration. Voices are lifted. Souls ascend. And the light burns brightly.