Theater Breaking Through Barriers began 29 years ago as Theater By The Blind, an integrated company of blind, low vision and sighted artists aiming to change the image of the blind from dependence to independence by working together so seamlessly that, as both The New York Times and Time Out NY have pointed out, you can’t tell who’s who. Increasingly we feel that we must include all people with disabilites in our work. 52,000,000 Americans, 18% of us, are disabled. Yet only 2% of characters on TV exhibit a disability and only 0.5% are permitted to speak. We need get the reality of our active and productive lives in front of people.
We do two kinds of plays - original material by and about disabled people, such as our June, 2007 production of John Belluso’s The Rules of Charity which The New York Times called “a dark, scalding play (in) a sharp New York premiere,” and traditional plays which give our artists great parts to play. Last season this was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Times said the show was “an inspired choice for Theater By The Blind… fascinating… ingenious,” with “the most intriguing thing (being) how the company stages the play with just six actors” and with the use of an actress in a wheelchair adding a “most delightful extra layer of meaning in the production.”

Our growth has been most powerful in the last 4 years. In FY04 we went on Equity's LOA contract making us officially Off-Broadway. Last fall we started work under a two-year $65,000 audience development matching grant from Theater Communications Group and the Mellon and Doris Duke Foundations to help us become the home base theater for all disabled people by increasing touring and workshops and expanding our mainstage season from one to two plays and from four week runs in FY05-06 to five in FY06-07 and six in FY07-08.

The grant has been matched by $60,000 from the New York Community Trust, $30,000 from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and $25,000 from the Emma A. Sheafer Charitable Trust. These will extend the grant work into FY08-09. This past season we increased earned income from $16,619 to $40,741, a growth of $24,122 or 145%, and total income from $281,190 to $387,713, a growth of $106,523, or 138%.

Since 2001 we have represented the U.S. every other October at an amazing event, the International Theater Festival of the Blind and Visually Impaired, held in Zagreb, Croatia, where we have joined artists from England, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Israel and Poland.

HISTORY OF MAJOR PRODUCTIONS