Cuban Theater Digital Archive

Sanctuary: Playwrights Theatre, a focused, slim, writer-managed theatre - once a commonplace but now a rarity - provides a fresh model for developing playwrights. Sanctuary is a writer-run play development organization offering development bound to the single most important step in that process - production.

In response to field-wide problems with development and production of innovative new work, Sanctuary has created a Definitive Mission, Distinct Structure, and Focused Scope to address them. Theatres built on the model of Sanctuary will develop not just plays, but playwrights, by returning the responsibility and power of production to the writer, renewing the model of Playwright As Producer.

The model is a streamlined, artist-managed company with a small, manageable budget that will encourage and be funded to take risks. Plays successfully staged by Sanctuary will then carry critical and/or audience viability for another theatre, which might have made a more conservative choice otherwise. Were this model to spread across the nation, it could help reinvigorate theatre.

(Information taken from theater's website)