Alliance Stage Company
The Alliance Stage Company is a senior theatre group based in New York City.
Performances include short skits, musical comedy, improv, readers theater, and plays inspired by the life stories of company members. Offstage, members work as playwrights, puppeteers, dressers, ushers, and act in television and film.
Since 2009, the Alliance Stage Company has been under the direction of Cory Michael Herman.
Drama classes are offered weekly — in-person and virtually — for adults 60 and older at Educational Alliance, a 130-year-old organization offering transformational services and high-quality, multi-generational programs throughout its network of community centers on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Village. New members are always welcome!
Now available for performances!
Achievements
Members of the Alliance Stage Company have been featured in documentary films (A Certain Age); shorts (A Midnight Snack); television (A Crime to Remember); Off-Off Broadway plays (Dixon Place, The Players Theatre); industrials; and as background extras (The Greatest Showman, Law & Order: SVU, Dangerous Liaisons.) Others have used the techniques of stagecraft to speak at public meetings, address city hearing boards, and become active in their residential Co-ops.
See our feature in Senior Theatre Resource Center’s Art Age’s “Who’s Who in Senior Theatre.”
The company was also the subject of the 1999 Academy Award-winning short documentary film, “The Personals: Improvisations on Romance in the Golden Years.”
Virtual Programming
The Alliance Stage Company has resumed meeting in person! Still, the group continues to engage remote and homebound members through hybrid rehearsals and performances.
During the COVID-19 closures, Alliance Stage Company pioneered theater-making for a virtual platform. The group performed digital theater pieces, recorded public service announcements for NYC Census 2020, and participated in New York Public Library’s History Now: Pandemic Diary Project. The pandemic significantly impacted older New Yorkers, and yet their commitment to keep the group moving forward during this time was a powerful lesson in how art is a valuable creative outlet for our community affecting positive change; how acting classes served as a reduction in social isolation connecting members to friends and family; and how technology allowed those in isolation to stay civically engaged.
