New WORLD Theater Records

This series contains documents which detail the day-to-day activities of the theater in both the administrative and production realms. The administrative records include in depth budgets of each fiscal year, purchase requests, email correspondence, applications and awards of grants, status reports by outside groups on the state of New WORLD Theater, staff evaluations, plans for retreats and more. There are also copies of outgoing mail to New WORLD Theater members, as well as their contact information.

The production records include flyers and publicity, scripts, background info, records of panel discussions, reports on visits by eminent artists, anthologies of student works, and other documents related to the challenges of producing and staging works of theater. Of particular interest are the documents regarding the highly acclaimed Project 2050! Youth engagement program, which include poetry and short stories from local, impoverished youth; as well as the fantastic original work "West Side Stories", written by Robert Uno, detailing the 1999 controversy over staging West Side Story at Amherst High School.

The materials in this series are organized chronologically. Whenever possible, for any particular year, the materials are separated into two sections, one for administrative and one for production, although this was not possible in all cases due to the interrelatedness of the two aspects of NWT.

The "Intersections" conference was first held at UMass Amherst in 1998 as a bi-annual conference designed to provide networking opportunities to playwrights and teachers across the country, and to keep NWT engaged with the cutting edge in aesthetics and staging of theater. The conference was an immense success, with five consecutive conferences held in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. The focus of the conference was largely on panel discussions, with dozens of experts in the field holding talks about a particular aspect of theater which was of interest to them.

The Intersection records include correspondence between NWT and prospective participants of the conference, publicity, transcriptions of panel discussions and feedback on the conference. Materials are organized by conference and identified as Intersection I-Intersection V.

This series contains taped interviews, videos from conferences and tapings of original productions.