Once upon a time, ten years ago, in New York...

A couple of entrepreneurial theater artists who strained to find a couple of Brecht plays sprouting in the US theater desert thought this wasn't big or contemporary enough and so they founded the export and import company German Theater Abroad, with offices in Berlin and New York. GTA may be starting on a Sisyphean task, but in this case, we’ll have to imagine Sisyphus as a happy person.
[Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 9, 2004]

 
Readings in the GTA Shop, Berlin...

The critical exchange between the USA and Germany is not only suggested, it’s actually practiced. It is always to the point. And the point is as simple as it is basic: Theater doesn’t have to look old. It’s simply about finding contemporary and entertaining forms.
[Zitty, February, 2003]

Whoever is presented here can hope for something bigger: Today Schröderstrasse, tomorrow, perhaps, Broadway.
[Die Zeit, July 15, 2004]

 
Festivals in New York...

There was a lot of interest. On some nights, up to two hundred New Yorkers crowded in the lobby when there were no seats left in the theater.
[Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 19, 2004]

The first of the two main plays on the program [“Slipped Disc”] had the audience laughing out loud most of the evening. […] So it’s impressive that GTA, the 10-year-old organization behind “Stadttheater New York”, did so well by its first play this season. Not just in selecting one that the audience here can relate to […], but in presenting an idiomatic American version, with five very good (non-German) actors.
[The New York Times, 10/05/06]

 
Cultural Exchange

This irresistibly earnest organization has striven to bridge the yawning gulf between the American and German theatre worlds […].GTA has grown into the most important organ of German-American theatrical exchange.
[American Theatre Magazine, May/June 2006]

The most interesting thing about the festival was that it could break down cultural clichés. Theater and art are particularly good at doing this.
[Philip Seymour Hoffman in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 19, 2004]

 
The Theater We Want!

Which actually brings us to the most important questions of the festival: What is the theater we want? [...] We want high quality theater, theater that touches us and changes us and to be able look beyond the edge of our national plates and learn new perspectives on both sides of the Atlantic and maybe, by doing this, we can finally bury the clichés of the stupid, rich American and the humorless, cynical German. Both systems could learn so much from each other. One can hope that the German Theaterkantine in SoHo will always be full in the next weeks and that many people will let themselves be inspired by the German perspective.
[Deutschlandfunk, May 13, 2006]