Hello everyone, I’m Moisés Kaufman, I am a playwright, director and Artistic Director of Tectonic Theater Project and I am honored to have been asked to address you on World Theater Day 2026.
Hola, soy Moisés Kaufman, soy escritor, director y director artístico de Tectonic Theater Project. Y me siento honrado de haber sido elegido para dirigirme a ustedes en este Día Mundial del Teatro 2026.
There are moments in history when the world feels as though it is breaking apart — when language itself becomes unstable, when facts are contested, when communities fracture along lines of fear and suspicion. In such moments, we may ask ourselves: What is the role of theatre?
I was born in Venezuela and came to the United States as an immigrant. To leave one’s country is to experience rupture — of language, of belonging, of certainty.
It was through this experience of displacement that I began to understand theatre not simply as performance, but as a space of encounter. A place where identities can be examined rather than assumed. A place where complexity is not feared, but honored. My life between cultures taught me that the act of listening across difference is both fragile and transformative.
When we founded Tectonic Theater Project, we were driven by a simple curiosity: How do we understand the world through the stories of others? How do we gather narratives from the real world, fragments of memory, contradiction, silence — and shape them into something that allows us to see more clearly?
So we asked how a group of artists might come together not merely to interpret a story, but to examine the forces beneath it, to gather voices, to sit with contradiction.
This process has taught me something essential: theatre is not the art of certainty. It is the art of inquiry.
Theatre, at its most urgent, is an act of investigation.
When we created The Laramie Project from the voices of a small American town grappling with an act of violence, we discovered that the stage could become a civic space. Audiences did not come simply to watch; they came to witness. They came to confront grief, anger, confusion, compassion — sometimes all at once. The theatre became not a courtroom and not a pulpit, but a gathering place.
That experience changed me. It revealed that theatre can hold complexity without sacrificing community.
In our time, public discourse often demands that we choose sides quickly. It rewards outrage and punishes nuance. Yet theatre insists on something different. It asks us to dwell in ambiguity. It reminds us that a single story rarely contains the whole truth. It invites us to encounter the humanity of those we might otherwise reduce to categories.
This is not a passive act. It is a courageous one.
To sit in the dark beside strangers and listen deeply is a form of resistance. It resists isolation. It resists dehumanization. It resists the temptation to turn away.
In a world mediated by screens and algorithms, this shared tribal experience is radical. It cannot be paused, scrolled, or muted. It unfolds in real time, and we are accountable to one another within it.
I have often reflected on the word “tectonic.” It refers to the forces beneath the earth’s surface — slow, invisible pressures that eventually reshape landscapes. Theatre works in a similar way. It may not create immediate transformation, but it exerts pressure. It shifts perception. It unsettles assumptions. It opens cracks through which empathy can enter.
And empathy is not a sentimental concept. It is an ethical practice.
When actors embody other people — when they carry their words, their cadences, their hesitations — they ask us to imagine what it feels like to inhabit another life. That imaginative act is foundational to democracy. A democratic society depends upon our capacity to see beyond ourselves.
Peace, too, depends on that capacity.
Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is the presence of understanding. It is the willingness to engage difference without erasure. It is the courage to hear a story that challenges our own.
Theatre does not provide solutions to global crises. It does something both more modest and more profound: it creates the conditions for intimate encounters.
Within the space of a stage, we practice holding multiple truths. And we train in empathy.
These practices are not separate from civic life; they are essential to it.
On this World Theatre Day, I think of theatre-makers across the globe — in grand institutions and in makeshift spaces, in cities and in villages, in times of stability and in times of conflict. I think of artists who rehearse under threat, who speak when silence would be safer, who gather communities even when resources are scarce. Their work affirms something fundamental: the human need to tell stories and to hear them is irrepressible.
Today, let us honor the rehearsal rooms where questions are asked with rigor and humility. Let us honor the actors who risk vulnerability. Let us honor the designers who shape worlds from light and shadow. Let us honor the crews and theater staffs that make the work possible.
And let us recommit ourselves to the slow, tectonic work of listening.
If the forces beneath the surface are powerful enough, landscapes shift.
May our stages continue to shift the landscape of the human heart.
Let us keep asking questions.
Let us keep listening.
Let us keep gathering in the dark — believing that when the lights rise, we may see one another more clearly.
Thank you.