Professor Jeff Strabone can definitely be considered more than ordinary. Aside from teaching English, Strabone acts as both the chairman and a cofounder of the New Brooklyn Theater (NBT).
The journey began for Strabone in 2012 when he first incorporated the company with Jonathan Solari.
“One of my former students who is a theater prodigy wanted to start a company, and he asked me for advice,” Strabone said. “I ended up joining the board, right at the start, so I just said ‘Sure, let’s do it.’”
The NBT started producing shows in fall of 2013, but their breakthrough came this past January when they strayed from the theatrical norm of performing in a theater and instead produced a performance in a hospital.
“In January 2014, we did a site-specific production of Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith. We did it inside a hospital,” Strabone said. “Interfaith Medical Center was going to close; it had fallen out of the headlines. And we approached them and said [how] we had wanted to do this play that is set in a hospital, in their hospital to bring the attention back.”
After running the show for two months, members of Congress, actor and singer Harry Belafonte and labor leaders came to performances, and after each performance, the audience, cast and crew were involved in a dialogue with each other.
“We spread a lot of consciousness about the show, and the newspapers and the TV stations came back to the hospital. And politicians said they were not going to let this hospital close, and the hospital was saved,” Strabone said. “And the people that ran the hospital said that we were the reason it was saved, and we had actually used theater to save lives.”
The Death of Bessie Smith was not the first time that the company reached into their creative reservoirs to put on a play. Strabone ended up writing an original adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People to stage in West Virginia.
“There was a chemical spill in West Virginia this past year and 300,000 people couldn’t drink water or take showers. Since Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is a play about poisoned water, we built a floating stage on the river that was polluted and performed on the stage, and the audience literally sat on the river that was polluted,” Strabone said.
Interacting with the audience and engaging them into the shows is one of the core goals of the NBT. They have been able to achieve this by introducing conversations with the audience after each performance and allowing them to share their thoughts with the company.
“We do great plays, and then we use the plays as an opportunity to have a dialogue. On our website we have a mission statement, and part of our mission is to use theater, whenever theater is needed to [help] move forward a public conversation,” Strabone said. “We’re staging great art that is great on its own, but it’s also always connected with a kind of social function. We’re always asking ourselves and [the] audience, ‘What more can theater do in the world?’”
Helping renovate the theater on 1215 Fulton Street in Brooklyn is also incorporated in the theater’s mission. The theater was first opened in the early twentieth century, but has not been used for well over a decade.
“It’s been closed since 1998, and we want to convert it into a performing arts center. In fact, we’re working with architects, theater designers and the new owners,” Strabone said.
The company hopes to finish with the renovations within the next three years and eventually hold their performances there. In the meantime, the company has been performing in various theaters throughout Brooklyn and started a new reading series this summer.
“We took four early African American plays that people have forgotten, and we are staging [them] again,” Strabone said.
Once the NBT has finished resurfacing these four plays, the audience will be asked to give advice on which play would become the company’s full production this fall; yet another way the company members strive to involve the public.
For Strabone, The NBT, however, is more than just a way to bring people together and put on performances.
According to Strabone, “the theater company brings together everything I care about: literature, performance, activism and fun” •
