Broadway's Bryce Pinkham and Lucas Caleb Rooney Find a Home for Their Nonprofit Zara Aina

Broadway actors Bryce Pinkham (A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder) and Lucas Caleb Rooney (Doctor Faustus) have found a home for their nonprofit organization, Zara Aina, in Madagascar.

Pinkham and Rooney cofounded Zara Aina in order to help empower at-risk children in Madagascar through theatrical story-telling techniques and performance, as well as to provide them with medical and educational assistance.

The new space, to be called Zara Aina @ the ViMa Center for Kids, is being funded by the local Malagasy real estate company Vision Madagascar (ViMa) Group, which will pay the rent on the space for the first full year of use.

"We are overjoyed to find this semi-permanent space as we search for land to build a fully equipped center to serve more children," said Rooney.

The center will offer classroom spaces, a performance theater, offices, and a kitchen facility. The children, who are part of the Zara Aina theater company, will also receive medical visits at the center. Acting, English, and art classes will also be provided to three classes of up to 45 children, over a rolling three-year curriculum period. Classes will be lead, primarily, by a five-person Malagasy staff.

"This partnership with ViMa marks an important milestone in Zara Aina’s mission to create a self sustaining local center for children in Antananarivo," said Pinkham. "ViMa founder Zouzar Bouka is a visionary and philanthropist, we are proud to be partnering with him and ViMa."

Pinkham and Rooney launched Zara Aina in 2012. The following year, the actors took 12 American artists to the country to help build a traveling theater show with a group of 14 at-risk Malagasy kids. The show was based on a well-known Malagasy folk tale and incorporated some of the same "clowning" techniques that Rooney and Pinkham teach at NYU and other American universities.