Doing it for GOOD.

Jim Augustine and Oren Michels met across the negotiating table during the pandemic, working on a deal they both hoped would be good for the theater industry they loved. Jim was at the time COO of Zuckerberg Media and its subsidiary Assemble Stream Inc. where he had built the models, financing and tech teams necessary to live-stream 2nd Stage‘s production of Clyde’s, a new play from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage. Once Ms Nottage approved in concept, Oren got to work on behalf of 2nd Stage, where he is a board member, negotiating for the organization’s best interests while hoping to navigate the theater industry that he loved toward sustainability through technology. While negotiating for their separate parties, the two developed a respect for one another’s expertise in business, and trust in one another’s passion for supporting theaters.

The partnership they forged resulted in Clyde’s being the first-ever simulcast run of a Broadway show. The experiment proved Broadway’s capacity to distribute productions live to all fifty states, to sell-out live-stream access at prices competitive to in-person ticket sales, and to bring radically new audiences into the 2nd Stage family. Reflecting on the show’s premiere in Rikers Island, two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage said that live-streaming “breaks down barriers … interrogating the notion of whether theater has to be in a box.” 

When ZM and ASI pivoted to other opportunities, Jim and Oren reconnected to finish what they had started, this time as a not-for-profit, building upon the ideas that brought them together to support 2nd Stage in the first place, but now for the benefit of not-for-profit theaters everywhere.

Their work, now called The League of Live Stream Theater, brings live, world-class theater into homes, schools and community centers around the world, believing that together, we can make theater more accessible than ever before, drive new audiences to new works, increase awareness for world-class stages and the artists who make their work possible, increase revenues, and help our institutions to thrive for another generation.