the week of june 6-10, 2022

sophocles: he's an icon, he's a legend, and he is the moment

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in-person theatre

• Eva O’Connor’s Maz and Bricks is now playing through June 26th at Solas Nua in DC. Rex Daugherty directs the two-hander set during the run-up to Ireland’s 2018 vote to repeal its abortion ban. (You can get 20% off with the code MAZZIE.)

• María Irene Fornés’ Sarita and René Marqués’ The Oxcart will receive readings on June 13 & 16 as part of the Roundabout Refocus Project. The initiative’s second year is focused on spotlighting lesser-known classic works of Latinx playwrights from the 20th and 21st centuries. (The readings will be available to stream in September.)

• Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould’s Lempicka starts performances June 14th at La Jolla Playhouse. Rachel Chavkin directs and Raja Feather Kelly choreographs the new musical exploring the life of Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, who “used her raw talent and relentless ambition to claw her way from penniless refugee to in-demand portraitist in 1920s Paris.”

• The world premiere of Steph Del Rosso’s 53% Of begins June 14th at Second Stage. Tiffany Nichole Greene directs the work, which draws its title from the number of white women who voted for Trump in 2016, and explores “what happens when we stop equating white womanhood with goodness and ignorance with innocence.”

• Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s cullud wattah runs June 15 - July 17 at Chicago’s Victory Gardens. The Afro-surrealist play about three generations of Black women living through the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan is directed by Lili-Anne Brown.

• Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet starts performances June 16th at Shakespeare Theatre Company. Jade King Carroll directs Chakrabarti’s debut work, based on 19th century Black American actor Ira Aldridge’s stage career in London.

• Olney Theatre’s The Music Man — featuring a company of Deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing artists — runs June 17 - July 24. Sandra Mae Frank and Michael Baron co-direct the classic musical, which will be performed in ASL and spoken English and open-captioned at every performance.

• Sam Mayer’s The Cuck runs June 15 - 26 at Intermural Theater in New Orleans. Bennett Kirschner directs the delirious retelling of Sophocles’ Electra about partying, class, and privilege. (Per the playwright: “I've been promised they followed my script to a T so there is LOTS OF VAPING.”)

• Adil Mansoor’s Amm(i)gone plays The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh on June 17th at 7 PM (Go if you’re at TCG!) In his adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, Mansoor explores queerness, the afterlife, and obligation using canonical texts, teachings from the Quran, and audio conversations between him and his mother.

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digital theatre

• Bakkhai, a new version of The Bacchae by Anne Carson and featuring original music by Diana Oh, is available to livestream June 15-19 from Baltimore Center Stage. Mike Donahue directs the immersive explosion of the Euripides classic, billed as “not your English teacher's Greek tragedy.”

• Talene Monahon’s Jane Anger is available to stream June 14-26. The play premiered at the New Ohio in February; Jess Chayes directed the anachronistic Jacobean feminist revenge comedy that reimagines Shakespeare’s famed quarantine.

• the wish: a manual for a last-ditch effort to save abortion in the united states through theater is now available for download from New Georges and Clubbed Thumb. The free, downloadable play “meant to spark conversation and encourage pro-choice programming in the wake of increasing numbers of statewide abortion bans” is a collaboration between playwrights Justice Hehir, Dena Igusti, Phanésia Pharel, Nia Akilah Robinson, and Julia Specht.

• Audible announced the release of four new streaming productions. The plays, all originally performed at the Minetta Lane, include Robert O’Hara’s production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, You Are Here: An Evening with Solea Pfeiffer, Jade Anouka’s Heart (directed by Ola Ince), and Adam Rapp's immersive audio-only play The Cube.

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award season

• The 2022 Drama Desk winners were announced. Company, Clyde’s, and SIX each won four awards, while Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s Kimberly Akimbo received Outstanding Play and Musical, respectively.

• The Playwrights’ Center announced the 2022-23 McKnight Theater Artist Fellows. The $25,000 fellowships, which recognize and support mid-career theatre artists (other than playwrights) living and working in Minnesota, went to actors Meghan Kreidler and Greta Oglesby and dramaturg Wendy Weckwerth.

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2022-23 season

• PlayPenn announced its 2022 conference playwrights. The selected plays are Brie Knight’s The Pigeon, Santiago Tonauac Castro’s Gente Del Sol, Ken Kaissar’s Fat Muslim Girls, Ian August’s All the Emilies in all The Universes, Nimisha Ladva’s Goddess at The Lucky Lady Motel, and Stephanie Kyung Sun Walters’ Whispers of My Sister. The conference — which recently appointed new artistic leadership and has been in rebuilding mode since its 2020 implosion — was only open to submissions from writers who were born, raised, educated, and/or current/former residents in Philadelphia.

• Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced its 2023 season. The line-up includes Romeo and Juliet (directed by Nataki Garrett), RENT (directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene), Candrice Jones’ Flex (directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg), Twelfth Night (directed by Dawn Monique Williams), Kirsten Childs’ adaptation of The Three Musketeers (directed by Kent Gash), Madeline Sayet’s Where We Belong (directed by Mei Ann Teo), adrienne maree brown and Troy Anthony’s To Feel A Thing: A Ritual for Emergence, the world premiere of Caridad Svich’s adaptation of Yerma (directed by Evren Odcikin), and various digital theatre initiatives, including a virtual reality festival, a digital storytelling project led by Indigenous artists, and a series of “short films by groundbreaking Black writers and creatives filmed in beloved Black-owned businesses in San Francisco/Bay Area and Houston.” (I’ve read a lot of season announcements lately, and this is one of the few companies announcing a deliberate, robust slate of digital theatre projects.)

• Speakeasy Stage announced its 2022-23 season. The Boston theatre will produce Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Sanaz Toossi’s English, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, Hansol Jung’s Wild Goose Dreams, and the musical The Prom.

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the regional theatre game of thrones

• Freedome Bradley-Ballentine is the new director of artistic programs and associate artistic director at the Public Theater. He was most recently the associate artistic director and director of arts engagement at The Old Globe.

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end of an era

• San Diego Repertory Theatre is suspending operations after 46 years. Artistic director and co-founder Sam Woodhouse announced his retirement in February, but the theatre cited multiple reasons for the shutdown, including “financial issues, the need for restructuring, the lack of significant funding, low ticket sales during the pandemic, and the challenges associated with operating theatres located underneath an active construction site.”
  
  The board is looking to financially restructure and intends to “rebuild a sustainable future.” San Diego Rep is the latest organization to collapse after a founder’s exit, following The Lark and House Theatre of Chicago — but at least the Rep didn’t appoint a new BIPOC artistic director to briefly inherit the mess before shuttering.

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film & tv news relevant to our interests

• Tina Satter is adapting and directing a feature film based on Is This A Room. The movie will star Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, and Marchánt Davis.

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things I read this week when I wasn’t watching fire island

• Diep Tran’s 20-year timeline of the development of A Strange Loop, from the first song to its early Musical Theatre Factory workshops (in a porn studio) to Broadway (Vulture)

• Elliot C. Williams on the Shakespeare Theatre Company production department’s unionization efforts (DCist)

• Nicole Hertvik’s follow-up article on the toxic leadership accusations at Spooky Action Theater in DC, detailing the mass staff resignations and artistic director Richard Henrich’s board-ordered “leave of absence”, which bars him from the building and interacting with the staff, but lets him retain financial and managerial oversight of the organization. Grateful that DC Theater Arts is continuing to report on this absolute clownery. (It is a truth universally acknowledged that smaller theatres think they can get away with the most ridiculous, embarrassing, and harmful conduct because no one is paying attention to them.)

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that’s not a living wage

Here are this week’s featured underpaid job listings, paired with the living wage for a 40-hour work week for one adult with no children in that area and the most recently available 990 data. (You can read more about the methodology here.)

My new favorite scam is theatres posting hourly rates, as if I can’t do basic multiplication to deduce the position is only livable if someone is working a ridiculous amount of overtime every week. Here’s a great example:

• Assistant Company Manager, La Jolla Playhouse (full-time non-exempt): $18/hour = $720/week for 40 hours, or $37,440 annually. (And there’s no way this position is working only 40 hours a week.)

  • Living Wage for San Diego, CA: $53,753

  • Total Expenses (2019): $18.3 million / Revenue Less Expenses: $3.2 million

  • Executive Compensation: $318,293 (Artistic Director) / $238,773 (Managing Director)

(I’m using La Jolla’s 2019 990 because their 2020 form is wild: the company’s contributions and grants jumped from $9 million in 2019 to $53 million the next year? I’m assuming it’s related to a capital campaign around the Theatre District Development, but it didn’t feel like an accurate reflection of their usual finances.)

Anyway, the real point here is that company managers are one of the many unsung heroes of the American theatre and you’re not paying them enough. I was one for a year right out of undergrad (my annual salary was $22,000 with no overtime — a crime even back then) and my biggest takeaways from that job are that I can carry a full-size mattress up two flights of stairs by myself and I hold a forever grudge against a now-famous artist who demanded that I come over at 11 PM and wash their floors for them.