The Tank

The story

The Tank charges artists nothing to use its stage — a policy that, since 2003, has quietly shaped New York theater from the outside in. Eight recent college graduates, most of them from Yale, Oberlin, and Harvard, founded it that May, including playwrights Amy Herzog and Alex Timbers. The organization has moved several times and now anchors 36th Street with a black box, a proscenium, and five rehearsal studios. It presents over 1,000 performances a year. In 2020 it received an Obie Award for sustaining the artists most institutions overlook.