the week of january 26 - february 1, 2024

$5000

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Graphic Design: Elizabeth Haley Morton | Editorial Support: Ryan Adelsheim

productions

• Nilo Cruz’s Two Sisters and a Piano starts performances January 25th at Miami New Drama. Cruz also directs the “authentic tale of oppression, human spirit, and the intertwining fates of two sisters awaiting freedom in a world of shifting global politics.”

• Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love starts previews January 26th at Berkeley Rep. Trip Cullman directs the provocative drama about a deeply Christian family “gathering for the holidays at their childhood home, singing joyous carols and reenacting family rituals until the forced cheer, alcohol, and repressed feelings shatter the façade and all hell breaks loose.”

• The world premiere of Leonard Madrid’s Cebollas runs January 26 - March 10 at The Denver Center. The outlandish comedy about “three sisters transporting a dead body across state lines” is directed by Jerry Ruiz.

• Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God starts previews January 26th at Speakeasy Stage in Boston. Melinda Lopez directs the intimate Idaho-set drama about “a mortgage broker and a yogurt plant worker unexpectedly bringing each other into their fragile worlds that revolve around their infant daughters.”

• Manual Cinema’s Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About A Terrible Monster runs January 26-28 at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. The multimedia performance collective “uses hundreds of illustrated paper puppets, book pages, two-dimensional props, furry monster puppets, and songs to bring Mo Willems' books to life.”

• The world premiere of Lorene Cary’s Ladysitting is now playing through March 3 at the Arden Theatre Company in Philadelphia. An exploration of the playwright’s grandmother’s life and last year, the new work “journeying through five generations of their African-American ancestors” is directed by Zuhairah McGill.

• Sanaz Toossi’s English starts previews January 27th at The Old Globe in San Diego. Arya Shahi directs the Pulitzer-winning, Tehran-set play about “four adult students preparing for an English proficiency exam, bonding over this new way to express themselves and grappling with the lives they must leave behind.”

• Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Illinoise runs January 28 - February 18 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The new musical, based on Sufjan’s 2005 concept album, is an “ecstatic pageant of storytelling, theater, dance, and music…a journey through [Illinois]—from campfire stories to the edges of the cosmos.”

• Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy starts performances January 28th at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore. Reginald L. Douglas directs the poignant drama about a grieving teenager in 1950s Brooklyn “caught between her father’s spirituality and her aunt’s activism as she learns to find her own definition of the American Dream.”

• Corinne Jaber’s MUNICH MEDEA: HAPPY FAMILY runs January 30 - February 25 in a co-production from WP Theater and Play Co. The new play “capturing the wild vulnerability of youth and the heavy armature of adulthood in unsparing, theatrical detail” is directed by Lee Sunday Evans.

• Dominique Morisseau’s Sunset Baby starts performances January 30th at Signature Theatre in NYC. Steve H. Broadnax III directs Morisseau’s 2013 work about “love, political action, and one woman’s journey from a brutal existence to her own liberation.”

• The world premiere of Sasha Denisova’s My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion runs January 30 - February 18 at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. The Woolly Mammoth co-production “inspired by online chats with [the playwright’s mother] about a family’s connection and legacy amidst the present-day war in Ukraine” is directed by Yury Urnov.

• The world premiere of a.k. payne’s Furlough’s Paradise starts previews January 31st at The Alliance in Atlanta. Tinashe Kajese-Bolden directs the Kendeda-winning new work about two cousins returning to their hometown for a pair of funerals as “they try to make sense of grief, home, love, and kinship.”

• Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s starts previews January 31st at Syracuse Stage. Chip Miller directs the dramedy about a truck stop kitchen staff learning to “reclaim their lives, find purpose, and become inspired to dream by their shared quest to create the perfect sandwich.”

• Jonathan Spector’s This Much I Know runs January 31 - February 25 at Theater J in DC. The “part mystery, part love story, part philosophical quest” is directed by Hayley Finn.

• Geoff Sobelle’s FOOD runs February 1-4 at the Fusebox Festival in Austin. The “intimate dinner party performance of smell, taste, and touch offering a meditation on the ways and whys of eating” is co-created with Steve Cuiffo and co-directed with Lee Sunday Evans.

• 600 Highwaymen & Talking Band’s The Following Evening runs February 1-18 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in NYC. The “intimate portrait of two artists creating what may be their final performance together, set against the landscape of New York, a city of perpetual loss and renewal” is a collaboration between two theater-making couples a generation apart: Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet of Talking Band, and Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone of 600 Highwaymen.

workshops & readings

• Heidi Armbruster’s Murder Girl will have a reading on January 26th at Page 73. Colette Robert directs the new work “about being in a family and about running a family business — and the people that become family when you work together.” (The reading is currently sold out but you can email info@page73.org to be added to the waitlist.)

• AriDy Nox’s bayou will have a reading on January 26th at The Playwrights Center’ in Minneapolis. The new work is the “first play in a series that explores relationships between community members, between generations, and between the village and Mother Bayou.”

festivals

• The Ford’s Theatre Legacy Commissions: A First Look runs January 26-27 at Ford’s Theatre in DC. The two-day festival features three staged readings of commissioned new works about underrepresented historical figures and themes of social justice and racial equity. Readings include Charlayne Woodard’s A Designer of Note, A Woman of Style, directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, about the life of fashion designer Ann Lowe; Nambi E. Kelley’s SISTER X, directed by Hana S. Sharif, about a young mother’s quest to share her life’s challenges with Malcolm X; and Chess Jakobs’ The American Five, directed by Aaron Posner, which explores present-day biases and racial discord inside a graduate classroom.

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the regional theatre game of thrones

• Melia Bensussen is the new artistic director of the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Bensussen is currently the artistic director of Hartford Stage, a position she will retain alongside her responsibilities at the O’Neill. She served as the guest artistic director last summer following Wendy C. Goldberg’s departure.

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assorted news

• Five theatres formed the Future of the American Theatre Cohort. Cleveland Public Theatre, Company One (Boston), Crowded Fire Theater (San Francisco), Mosaic Theater (DC), and Perseverance Theatre (Juneau, AK) will share resources, foster collective learning, champion new visions, and innovate new strategies in equitable practices, leadership structure, interconnectivity, and decolonization. The collective is supported by a $2.5 million grant from The Mellon Foundation.

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our ongoing labor crisis

• Baltimore Center Stage laid off 8% of its staff and instituted mandatory pay cuts. The remaining staff members will receive salary reductions ranging from 1% to 10% in an effort to reduce the theatre’s operating budget by 5%, or $350,000. The company cited the now-familiar constellation of financial and existential crises: the decline of the subscription model, the end of COVID relief aid, inflation, and dwindling audiences.

• The Los Angeles Times laid off more than 20% of its newsroom. Among those cut were theatre reporter Ashley Lee and critic Soraya Nadia McDonald, who had recently left The Undefeated/Andscape for a yet-to-be-announced role at LAT that now doesn’t exist.
  
  Ashley’s investigation into the toxic working conditions at the Williamstown Theatre Festival was one of the most consequential feats of theatre journalism in recent years. (She also wrote this cover story on theatre workers who chose not to return to the industry post-pandemic, featuring yours truly.) Soraya is a Pulitzer finalist and when someone asked me a few weeks ago who was my dream choice for chief theater critic at the Washington Post, I said her without hesitation. Soraya and Ashley are two of the finest culture reporters and critics working today and they both deserve a workplace (and industry) that values their expertise and talent.

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what i read this week

• Ife Olujobi’s “$5000”, a vital essay in The Dramatist about how she advocated for an increased advance and compensation for her upcoming production of Jordans at the Public Theater. There is so much unpaid labor expected from writers during the pre-production process, from auditions to rehearsals to institutional meetings. And as Ife articulates, the industry-wide financial problems are an insufficient excuse for this continuation of this practice:

  I’m very aware of the fact that this is an incredibly precarious time financially for theaters and live arts presenting venues across the country, and there are people who think we shouldn’t be asking for more money in these conditions. I respectfully and vehemently disagree. Playwright compensation is not the reason why theaters are struggling. Even when The Public was flourishing in the Hamilton years, they were still paying playwrights $5,000. Even when theaters have done well they still pay playwrights nothing, so any suggestion that we should wait until things are better or more financially stable for them before we ask for what we deserve is complete bullshit. If you cannot pay the artists whose work your institution is built on, it’s time to throw in the towel because you are failing your mission at its core and robbing artists of their livelihoods.

Related: Last April, we posted a Bills, Bills, Bills money diary from two playwrights in partnership with playwrights C. Quintana and Winter Miller, as part of their initiative to draw attention to the pay inequity for writers across our industry, known as the Survive and Thrive Movement.