the week of march 7-11, 2022

nathan detroit lives his life one quarter mile at a time

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hi new subscribers!

Thanks to Alan Zilberman for interviewing me for Inside Hook on this newsletter, inequity and wage exploitation in the industry, and whether or not I am "a force to be feared" in the theatre community. (My official answer is no but I am okay with men being scared of me.)

In the interview, I was asked about DC theatres to support and I gave a very incomplete answer because I was nervous, so I want to acknowledge some smaller companies I admire that are doing innovative and community-focused work: Theater Alliance, Pointless Theatre, The Welders, Young Playwrights’ Theater, and based on its upcoming season (more on that later) Mosaic Theater Company. This is a newsletter with a decidedly national focus, but I’ve lived and worked in DC for eleven years and there’s a real ecosystem of theatres and artists here that deserve wider recognition.

There was a subscriber bump after American Theatre shared the interview on socials (There are over 3,600 of you now!), so if you’re new: hi! You can learn more about the newsletter here. If you want to learn more about me (not necessary!), you can go to my website, which I hastily made so Vin Diesel can find me when he needs a dramaturg for the musical adaptation of The Fast and the Furious. (I think a lot about how Vin was going to play Nathan Detroit in a Spielberg-directed remake of Guys and Dolls. Instead we got Baby Driver as Tony in West Side Story. The injustice!)

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in-person theatre

• Steph Paul directs and choreographs Marco Ramirez’s The Royale at Kansas City Rep, now playing through March 27th. A reminder that it is the official position of Nothing for the Group that you should hire Steph Paul for anything and everything.

• Talene Monahon’s Jane Anger plays the New Ohio Theatre through March 26th. Jess Chayes directs the anachronistic Jacobean feminist revenge comedy that reimagines Shakespeare’s famed quarantine. (If I hear one more person use “you know he wrote King Lear during a plague” as a testament to the possibilities of pandemic productivity I will set the entire internet on fire.)

• Christopher Chen’s Passage is now playing at Chicago’s Remy Bumppo Theatre Company. The kaleidoscopic examination of colonization is directed by Kaiser Ahmed and marks the company’s return to in-person performances under new artistic director Marti Lyons.

• Lloyd Suh’s Bina's Six Apples runs March 11 - 27 at the Alliance Theatre. Eric Ting directs the world premiere co-production with Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre Company.

• The world premiere of Sleeping Weazel’s Everyday Life and Other Odds and Ends starts performance March 12 at ArtsEmerson. The Boston-based experimental theatre troupe’s multimedia experience delves into three relationships uniquely impacted by Parkinson’s disease and illuminates how “being able bodied is, like life itself, temporary.”

• Doug Wright’s new play Good Night, Oscar starts performances March 12th at the Goodman. Lisa Peterson directs the 1958-set comic drama, with Sean Hayes starring as character actor/pianist Oscar Levant during a particularly memorable live episode of The Jack Paar Show.

• Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue runs March 12 - April at City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh. Kent Gash directs the third play in Morisseau’s Detroit Cycle, a jazz-fueled, post-World War II drama following a tormented nightclub owner hungering for a fresh start as a looming urban renewal project threatens the neighborhood.

• Shaina Taub’s Suffs starts performances March 13th at the Public Theater. The world premiere musical about the birth of the American women’s suffrage movement is directed by Leigh Silverman.

• The world premiere of Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things runs March 15 - April 17 at Ars Nova. Lee Sunday Evans directs the music-theater event, featuring 18 singers and instrumentalists, which “infuses the classical oratorio with blues, gospel, jazz, and soul, unfolding the complex layers of what it means to be alive and our relationship to time.”

• JC Lee’s To My Girls starts previews March 15th at Second Stage. Stephen Brackett directs the Palms Spring-set comedy, about a close-knit group of gay men whose post-pandemic vacation goes awry.

• Poetry for the People: The June Jordan Experience will run from March 16 - 27 at the Anacostia Arts Center in a co-production from DC’s Theater Alliance and The IN Series. Raymond O. Caldwell and Adrienne Torf co-devised the world premiere exploration of social activist, teacher, essayist, and poet June Jordan’s life and legacy.

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digital theatre

• Audible announced its latest round of Theatre Originals, which are now available to stream. The first three plays, originally performed live and now available digitally, are Faith Salie’s Approval Junkie (directed by Amanda Watkins), DeLanna Studi’s And So We Walked (directed by Corey Madden), and Wallace Shawn's The Fever (directed by Scott Elliott). New releases include Paul Kruse’s Daddies (directed by Adil Mansoor), Christopher Chen’s The Podcaster (directed by Lee Sunday Evans), and Diane Exavier’s Bernarda's Daughters (directed by Dominique Rider).

• The world premiere of PearlDamour’s Ocean Filibuster is now available to stream on demand through March 27th. The “genre-crashing music theater experience fusing myth, song, stand-up, and science to explore the vast depths crucial to our daily survival” is directed by Katie Pearl.

• Diana Oh’s My H8 Letter to the GR8 American Theatre is now available on demand through March 16th. The “brutally candid and bitingly funny play about transparency, honesty, and repairing centuries of damage done in the American theatre industry” is directed by May Liang for Shotgun Players.

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2022-23 season updates

• There will be no 2022 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Artistic Director Robert Fleming said that the pandemic “has inspired a new approach to develop and produce new work on multiple platforms year-round.” The article’s a little vague about the festival’s future, but it sounds to me like it’s never coming back and you know there’s more to the story with the Humana Foundation. It’s important to reimagine current new play development models so they serve the artists without draining institutional capacity, but I also think losing a high-profile festival that premiered new work in a city outside the usual major theatre markets is a massive loss.
  

• Mosaic Theater Company announced its first season under new artistic director Reginald L. Douglas. The line-up is anchored by a rotating repertory of Ifa Bayeza’s The Till Trilogy — The Ballad of Emmett Till, Benevolence, and the world premiere of That Summer in Sumner — with a series of concerts, readings, panels, and symposiums presented in partnership with 20+ cultural organizations. Mosaic will also produce Idris Goodwin’s Bars and Measures (directed by Douglas), Mona Mansour’s Unseen, workshop productions of Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson’s new musical Mexodus and Jennifer Barclay and Hannah Khalil’s Murdered Men Do Bleed and Drip, The H Street Oral History Project (led by Psalmayene 24), and the inaugural Catalyst New Play Festival in January 2023.

• La Jolla Playhouse announced its full 2022-23 season. Adam Rapp's new musical The Outsiders (directed by Danya Taymor) and Christopher Ashley and Will Davis’ reimagined As You Like It join Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould's Lempicka: A New Musical (directed by Rachel Chavkin), the En Garde Arts production of Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes) (directed by José Zayas), and the world premieres of Moisés Kaufman's Here There Are Blueberries and Lauren Yee’s Mother Russia (directed by Tyne Rafaeli).

• Bedlam announced its 2022 season. The line-up includes a repertory of The Winter's Tale and a Jon Robin Baitz adaptation of Hedda Gabler. The company will also present Do More: New Plays, a play reading series to cultivate “a more just, equitable, and inclusive next generation of classics”, including Eleanor Burgess’ Sparks Fly Upwards, a.k. payne’s  love i awethu further, Zack Fine’s Dennis, Emily Breeze’s Mother Says She's Shocked, and Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor.

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accountability update: the flea

This week, Julia Jacobs wrote about the new artist-centric structures and ongoing rebuilding at the beleaguered Flea Theater for The New York Times.

To recap: The Flea announced a new producing model in October, almost a year after the suspension of the Resident Artist programs and the vague, messy organizational messaging around the transition. (If you really want to deep dive, I recommend Helen Shaw on the Flea’s long history of wage complaints, but Jacobs’ article also nicely summarizes the drama.)

Jacobs writes about the new artist pay policies and the Fled Collective — a group of writers, directors and actors that had spoken out against the old Flea, but now exist as a resident company within the organization. But I was especially struck by the reporting on the Flea’s financial struggles, stemming from half of the board exiting after former producing director Carole Ostrow’s “retirement”. In the last two years, the Flea’s staff has also dwindled from 13 to two. (The Flea still operates out of the $25-million three-theatre complex it opened in 2017.) Remaking an institution is a complicated process, but it seems like there’s an encouraging balance of thoughtful vision and unavoidable mess here.

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this week in bad ideas

arly @semicolonuser

not sure how a musical about emmett till, premiering at a school for cops, written by and centered on a white woman could get any more mindblowingly disrespectful or cruel, but i’m sure they’ll let us know soon

Playbill @playbill

Emmett Till, A New American Opera, will have its world premiere at @JohnJayCollege. → https://t.co/P3POYyQf02 https://t.co/pDMCE8mgFR

I didn’t have time to do my usual depressing scan through the dregs of ArtSEARCH for That’s Not a Living Wage, but someone DMed this truly bonkers dramaturg job posting and I offer it to you all as an unhinged gift. (Tag yourself, I’m “a strong troupe anywhere that is not designated an active war zone.”)