New City Stage Company's
Mission Statement, Vision, and Strategy for 2018

Mission Statement
New City Stage Company cultivates emerging playwrights and resident artists in the development of new and lesser-known works as they are shepherded towards full professional production. We become in involved in the process as early as possible to help support playwrights in bringing their ideas to fruition. We promote new and unknown plays, revivals, and adaptations to our audiences, as well as for commercial and artistic producers. We conduct yearly staged readings to evaluate and develop submitted and solicited materials. Additionally, we provide educational experiences and showcase performance opportunities for aspiring artists. We include at least one free-of-charge live event per season.

Our primary objective is to develop work from inception, through an alpha-omega incubator. Our intention is to serve the playwright first, a notion that has been mostly lost in modern theater.

The vision of New City Stage Company is to be Philadelphia's leading incubator for the development and advancement of new and emerging artists and playwrights in creating and preparing new, classic, and rarely-done plays for professional production. Our area of interest is political theatre that focuses on American history and current political issues affecting our world today.

Our strategy to achieve this vision is by constantly looking for, developing, creating, and producing new plays and forgotten older works that resonate with our audience and the current political environment. We do this by working directly with playwrights, and their estates if necessary, developing new work in-house with our resident artists, and exploring new ideas and concepts through our educational program.

We look for diverse voices to bring to the stage through the playwrights whose work we commission as well as the artists we hire. We search out lesser known historical events and under-represented issues and segments of society to share with our audience.


History
New City Stage Company was founded by theatre artist and graduate student Ginger Aña Dayla in the summer of 2006 to give college students and early career professionals quality working theatre opportunities alongside seasoned professional artists in Philadelphia. She funded and self-produced the first production in September 2006 to much fanfare. Many patrons and family foundations expressed interest in supporting another production and the company immediately filed for nonprofit status, which was compete by February 2008. We then started producing fully realized productions consistently, with occasional staged readings. Current Producing Artistic Director and professional actor Russ Widdall joined the organization in 2009 and helped expand the company to include even more professional artists, equity contracts, and notable playwrights. After the success of RFK in 2012, we realized our specific passion was to create new issue-driven work focusing incurrent events, civil issues, and human rights, all through the lens of the American political system. Political theatre is now the focus of our work.

Working together, the artistic directing team has expanded the company's repertoire to include a separate education program and devised work, fully produced professional plays and musicals, workshop productions, touring productions and participation in festivals, staged readings, and the option for new types of programming each season that suits our current audience and political environment.