What We Do
New York Classical Theatre's all-free productions are staged in public venues throughout the City. Our productions are dynamic and interactive, inviting the audience to personally engage with the story.
Our hallmark is our innovative staging style, Panoramic Theatre. We adapt each script to fully embrace our varied performance spaces, and give the audience an immersive theatrical experience. One reviewer described it as “a method by which the audience is less a witness to the actions before it, than at the center of those actions.” Panoramic Theatre staging techniques incorporate the venue to build an active, immediate, and direct relationship between the actors and their audience.
Attendance to open rehearsals and all performances is free to the public. There are no tickets. Please see Planning Your Visit for tips on attending our productions, including how to make a reservation for our next performance.
What is Panoramic Theatre?
Panoramic Theatre was originally created while I was searching for a way to reduce the physical impact on an actor’s vocal instrument during outdoor performance without the use of audio enhancement. I wanted the actors to maintain strong, muscular vocal health while not losing the musicality and range of their principal emotive instrument, their voice.
Through my work at New York Classical Theatre, I developed a system of blocking, adapted from staging techniques of the late 19th century, to ensure that the performer who was speaking would be facing (flat) downstage without drawing attention to their physical position in relation to other actors on stage. The performer’s voice would then have the opportunity to reach as large an area (audience) as possible and could fill the space without losing intonation, musical range, timbre, and thus the nuance of performative/character choices.
While creating these staging techniques, I soon recognized that the actors—now facing the audience directly while speaking—were also increasing their emotional interaction, or dialogue, with the spectators.
I next began reworking classical scripts, primarily through generous cutting, to turn our outdoor, accessible environments—primarily public parks—into the world of the play. The result was that both the performers and the audience were now sharing the same architectural space.
Finally, since our performances already take place in very large locations, I added audience movement into the mix so as to literally follow the characters as they journey through the world of the play.
Thus, I discovered by creating a new staging technique to bring the actors face-to-face with the audience, adapting each script to each venue, and bringing the audience into the world of the play (Environmental Theatre) by having them move throughout each venue from scene-to-scene (Promenade Theatre), this allowed me to create the following formulation for Panoramic Theatre…
The larger the audience’s investment of imagination into the performance, the stronger will be its interactive connection and emotional response to the play.
Stephen Burdman, Founding Artistic Director
Outdoors
Every summer since 2000, NY Classical has popped up in city parks including Central Park, The Battery (Battery Park), Carl Schurz Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn Commons at Metrotech, and on Governors Island.
In our outdoor productions, we take Panoramic Theatre a (literal) step further. Audience members physically follow the actors from place to place throughout the venue, entering the world of the play and becoming mobile participants in the story unfolding around them.
At certain venues, we play in a singular location to better support people with disabilities or who have other physical challenges.
Indoors
We have staged winter productions in Brookfield Place, ART/New York Mezzanine Theater, One New York Plaza, and One Liberty Plaza.
Our indoor performances add a layer of intimacy and accessibility to Panoramic Theatre. At each performance, the audience is lit with the same ambiance as the cast and our artists approach script adaptation, design, voice projection and blocking with the same intention: to foster connection and heighten viewers’ engagement.