About The Drama League

Our Mission

The Drama League is the preeminent creative development home for directors, offering access and opportunity to them, their collaborators, and the audiences they inspire across the world.

The Drama League helps artists and audiences in the following areas:

Our Values

  • Position creativity as a powerful engine for change.
  • Embrace artistic risk-taking, innovation and surprise — mistakes inspire solutions.
  • Insist on the conditions for artists and audiences to engage with thoughtfulness, care, openness, and empathy.
  • Strive to communicate openly and honestly, and expect others to do so as well.
  • Actively foster and advance an anti-racist, equitable, inclusive environment in our programs and on our team, especially lifting up BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists who have historically been marginalized and victimized in our field and our society.
  • Seek to inspire through service, and create opportunity for those in our communities to engage, learn, grow, and prosper.
 

Anti Hate Statement

The opposite of war isn’t peace. It’s creation.
Jonathan Larson
 
The Drama League stands against all acts of hatred and all systems of oppression that include terrorism, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, classism, colorism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and ethnocentrism.
 
The Drama League is a community of artists and the people who support their work across the world. This community includes, among many others, Jewish and Muslim individuals, and persons of Israeli and Palestinian descent who have been affected by the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. The act of artmaking is fundamentally one of peace; it requires creativity and imagination to generate solutions and offers alternative paths to living that can be explored safely.
 
Recent acts of antisemitism and Islamophobia are deeply troubling. We unequivocally and unapologetically condemn the terrorist attack by Hamas on the innocent civilians of Israel, and the ensuing loss of civilian lives in Israel and Palestine, including Gaza. We are deeply saddened by these events and renew our commitment to our community by providing a safe space for all our artists to work without restriction.

Anti Racism Statement

The present was an egg
laid by the past
that had the future inside its shell.
Zora Neale Hurston

 

As we together reckon with the insidious forces of racism in our world – compounded by pandemic, climate change, authoritarianism, and economic devastation – we are reminded of Zora Neale Hurston’s prophetic words. This is our present, but it has been made by our past, and it informs how we move forward to a more just, equitable, and anti-racist future. Today and every day, we join our members, artists, and all people of conscience in standing against the forces of bigotry and racism. We have a long way to go in this fight, but as Ms. Hurston observed, the future will be born from the actions we take today.


To the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Sean Reed and the incalculable number who have lost loved ones at the hands of racist violence: we see you, support you, and stand with you. Black lives matter. They always have, and they always will. At The Drama League, our mission and core values are to lift up and support artists for the theater community, to celebrate audiences whose lives are enriched by what artists create on stage. For many years, we have dedicated ourselves to anti-racist practices in our work, and we recommit every day to those values and practices. We will continue to align theater as a tool to uplift voices that need to be heard, so that we all may connect, challenge, and create a better, more just world.


The Board, Artists, Volunteers, Patrons and Staff of The Drama League stand in solidarity against racism and hate. The future has yet to be written.

Acknowledging The Land

The Drama League honors and acknowledges that our Theater Center sits upon the ancestral lands and unceded territory of the Lenni Lenape Nation, and offer our respect to elders both past and present.  We recognize the vital importance of speaking thoughts into action, especially concerning the legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that bring us together.  We make this reminder to ourselves, and to you, so that we may commit ourselves to dismantling the structures of colonization in our practice.
 
Since activities at The Drama League are also shared digitally to the internet, we take this moment to acknowledge and consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technologies, structures, and ways of thinking we use every day. We are using equipment and high speed internet not available in many Indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the art we make leave significant carbon footprints, contributing to changing climates that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples worldwide. We invite you to join us in acknowledging this as well as our shared responsibility: to make good of this time, and for each of us to consider our roles in reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship.
 
Credit and Thanks: Adrienne Wong of SpiderWebShow, Ontario, Canada, who wrote the acknowledgement upon which the above digital acknowledgement is based.