Our Mission
The National Pastime Theater strives to fill thousands of empty theater seats with generations of new theater audience, to stop this audience dead in their comfortable tracks and spur them to take an active role in their neighborhoods, communities and world.
Live theater must grab all generations and drag them–perhaps kicking and screaming–into an active role in our world.
Chicago is a perfect location for the type of theater that The National Pastime Theater Ensemble creates. We push ourselves and our audience to the limit. We aspire to bring people into the work, not just into the theater: we create terror, awe and strike down apathy. We sell not just tickets, we enable dreams.
The National Pastime Theater Ensemble (NPT) is like no other theater company. We are a company with a new reason for theater: setting to rights the jaded viewpoints of generations weaned on passive entertainment forms.
For twenty years, The National Pastime Theater has insured progress by producing dynamic and masterful live theater. In addition to producing live theater, NPT has fostered over one hundred and fifty emerging and staple Chicago theater companies. In an effort to expand our mission, NPT supports those itinerant theaters that present a similar focus to that of NPT's.
