NEW YORK CITY: Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) has announced that Arin Arbus will succeed founding artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz, effective on Aug. 31. Arbus served TFANA for over a decade as the theatre’s first associate artistic director, a post she held until 2017. Horowitz first invited her to direct Shakespeare, and in a statement Arbus said she considers it the “greatest honor” of her career to carry forward his “remarkable legacy at TFANA, an institution that has shaped me and been my artistic home for the past 15 years.”
Continued Arbus in a statement, “I’m deeply inspired by the heart of TFANA’s mission. We produce Shakespeare today because his language and ideas illuminate the urgent questions of our time. And by presenting his plays and other canonical texts alongside today’s boldest voices, we engage in a civic dialogue that spans centuries, expanding the definition of ‘classical’—and shaping the canon of the future.”
“Arin gets to the heart of what plays are about and why theatre is essential,” Horowitz said of Arbus in a statement. “She pushes boundaries and is profoundly unsatisfied by the satisfactory. Artists want to work with Arin. She is a wise and brilliant person with a gift of humor. Actors in her productions express the language and ideas of authors naturally and spontaneously. I am thrilled the board has chosen Arin and that Arin has chosen to lead the theatre.”
Arbus has an extensive history with TFANA, beginning as an assistant, receptionist, and gala coordinator in 2004, leading to her TFANA and Off-Broadway debut with Othello in 2009, a decade as associate artistic director, then a tenure of serving as resident director. As resident director, her credits include the New York premiere of Denis Johnson’s Des Moines, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and The Merchant of Venice, which also played at Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC) in D.C. and Royal Lyceum Theatre, in Arbus’s U.K. debut. Other TFANA directing credits include Measure for Measure, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, David Greig’s adaptation of Strindberg’s The Father, Thornton Wilder’s adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and a revival of Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, for which she won an Obie.
Outside of TFANA, credits include the world premiere of Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sound for Clubbed Thumb, which was remounted this spring at the Public; Ben Power and Stefani Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy at STC and at Guthrie Theater; the Tony-nominated revival of Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune; Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at Houston Grand Opera; and Verdi’s La Traviata at Canadian Opera Company, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Houston Grand Opera. Arbus is a Drama League directing fellow, a Princess Grace recipient, a TFANA Samuel H. Scripps winner, and an alum of Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab. Arbus has been a guest professor of theatre at Yale, Julliard, NYU, Brooklyn College, Fordham, Columbia, and The New School, and has a keen passion for what excites and moves the next generation of theatremakers and theatregoers.
TFANA is in the midst of a national search led by Arts Consulting Group for a new executive director who will work in partnership with Arbus.
Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director Dorothy Ryan, Theatre for a New Audience is a New York City home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. As of 2023, its budget is $7.1 million.
