Organizational History
Founded in 1981 as a small theatre arts conservatory for low-income youth by Ed Decker (a former director of the American Conservatory Theater’s Young Conservatory), NCTC has been in operation for 31 years. In 1986, as a response to the AIDS epidemic sweeping the nation and heavily concentrated in San Francisco, Decker created the landmark YouthAware Touring Educational Theatre program which has since expanded to address an array of health and wellness concerns, been translated into five languages, and achieved national and international recognition. To date, more than 4.5 million youth in the U.S., Germany, Australia, South Africa, Holland, and the U.K. have seen YouthAware Theatre-in-Education programs in their schools and communities. In 2004, Decker received the STOP AIDS Award for his work.
In 1995, Decker premiered the first Pride Season, a series of LGBT-themed performances that has since caught the eye of many renowned gay and gay-allied playwrights and directors. Decker has developed and/or premiered plays for NCTC’s main stage with artists such as Norman Allen, Terrence McNally, Edmund White, Joe Mantello, Mark Cannistraro, Mart Crowley, Jack Heifner, Hal Corley, Felice Picano, Brad Fraser, David Marshall Grant, Jeff Baron, Kevin Elyot, Jonathan Harvey, Jewelle Gomez, and Lee Blessing.
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“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)