the week of march 7-13, 2025
french comedies, wombats, Taylor Swift appreciation posts
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This month’s Bills, Bills, Bills follows a stage manager/server/barista juggling brunch shifts and evening closing week performances in the Midwest:
bills, bills, bills #34
Bills, Bills, Bills is a monthly series of anonymous money diaries from theatre workers curated and edited by Jenna Clark Embrey.
productions
FlawBored’s It's a Mother F**king Pleasure runs March 6 - 30 at Woolly Mammoth in Washington, DC. The disability-led theatre company’s “scathing satire on the monetization of identity politics, the guilt of non-disabled people, and what it costs to do the right thing” is presented in association with Studio Theatre and Arts Emerson.
Stephen Wadsworth’s translation of Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love starts performances March 7th at The Huntington in Boston. Loretta Greco directs the “uproarious classic French comedy where mistaken identities, hilarious complications and deeply felt desire collide head on with Rationalist Philosophy.”
Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector runs March 7 - 29 at Yale Rep in New Haven, CT. Yura Kordonsky directs his adaptation of “the outrageously anarchic comedy of errors.”
The Leonix Movement Theatre and Immersive Art Collective production of Megan Gogerty’s FEAST. runs March 8 - April 6 at The Count’s Den in Los Angeles, CA. The “vivid reimagining of the epic poem Beowulf as a cautionary tale” is directed by Laura Covelli.
Yasmina Reza’s ART starts performances March 8th at Shotgun Players in Berkeley, CA. Emilie Whelan directs Christopher Hampton’s translation of the 1994 French comedy about “a long friendship between three men that implodes when one purchases an expensive piece of modern art.”
David S. Kessler’s Wombat Drool starts performances March 8th at Nu Sass Productions in Washington, DC. Drawn from Kessler’s forty years of experience as a small mammal biologist at the National Zoo, Lynn Sharp Spears directs “the fictional and amusing rants of a man more comfortable with animals than people.”
Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles runs March 8 - 30 at City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh. The “inquisitive, hilarious and heartwarming examination of one woman's life—one birthday at a time” is directed by Marc Masterson.
Loy A. Webb’s The Light starts performances March 9th at Portland Center Stage in Oregon. Chip Miller directs the “real-time rollercoaster ride of romance and reckoning.”
José Rivera’s Your Name Means Dream runs March 12 - April 9 at Theater J in Washington, DC, presented in partnership with Hartford TheaterWorks. The “edge-of-our-current-time, profoundly intimate tragicomedy that asks what it means to be human as we embrace the technology of our future – and it embraces us” is also directed by Rivera.
Adil Mansoor’s Amm(i)gone starts performances March 13th Off-Broadway at The Flea. Lyam Gabel and Mansoor co-direct the “journey of heartbreak and repair between mother and son as they embark on an examination and translation of Sophocles' Antigone into Urdu.”
workshops & readings
Jake Brasch’s How to Draw a Triangle will have a reading on March 10th as part of the Ted Snowdon Reading Series at Manhattan Theatre Club. Colm Summers directs the “comedy about emerging queerness, the wreckage of our past, and the heroes who go out on a limb to help us become ourselves.”
festivals
Launchpad: A Made in Atlanta Festival runs March 11 - 23 at Theatrical Outfit. This year’s line-up includes Steve Yockey’s Venus (directed by Melissa Foulger), Phong Le’s solo musical comedy Stop the Vietnam War!, Stephen Ruffin and Filipe Valle Costa’s Mr. Cool, and Bridget McCarthy’s solo performance Fat Juliet (co-directed by Lauren Morris and Alejandra Ruiz).
Maggie Vannucci’s Grit runs March 6 - 8 as part of Steppenwolf’s LookOut series in Chicago. The “live dance work interrogating the underbelly of achievement through explorations of the isolating cost of competitive natures amongst four female performers” was created in collaboration with Laura Baumeister, Rahila Coats, Kate Laughlin, Hannah Marcus and Courtney Mackedanz.
The A-Tipico Latinx New Play Festival runs March 6 - 8 at Teatro Chelsea outside Boston. This year’s staged readings include Mario Vega’s L.A. Muerta (directed by Armando Rivera), Andrew Rincon’s The Leopard Women (directed by Carla Mirabal Rodriguez), and Tatiana Isabel Gil’s Salve Maria.
2025-26 season updates
Shakespeare Theatre Company announced its 2025-26 season. The Washington, DC theatre’s 40th anniversary line-up includes Othello (starring Wendell Pierce and directed by Simon Godwin), Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet (directed by Erica Whyman), a revival of Guys and Dolls (directed by Francesca Zambello and choreographed by Joshua Bergasse), Jocelyn Bioh's Merry Wives (a reimagining of The Merry Wives of Windsor directed by Taylor Reynolds), David Eldridge’s adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (directed by Godwin, in association with Theatre for a New Audience), and the Irish Rep production of Bill Irwin’s On Beckett.
Roundabout announced its 2025-26 Broadway and Off-Broadway seasons. The season — which overlaps with the renovation of one of their spaces — includes Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels (directed by Scott Ellis), Robert Icke’s Oedipus, Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show (directed by Sam Pinkleton), Rajiv Joseph’s Archduke (directed by Darko Tresnjak), and Alex Lin’s Chinese Republicans (directed by Chay Yew).
matters of facts
Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and SMU Data Arts released Theatre Facts 2023, an annual report sharing trends and activity across non-profit theatres’ finances, attendance, and operations between October 31, 2022 and September 30, 2023.
Here are the key findings, per American Theatre:
61% of Trend Theatres reported a negative Change in Unrestricted Net Assets (CUNA) in 2023—the highest drop since 2009, signaling financial strain across the field.
Total earned income increased by 94% since 2022, but remains 25% lower than 2019, highlighting an uneven recovery. (I cited SMU Data Arts’ earlier research on this subject in last week’s screed on the Kennedy Center.)
A special section on 141 Black, Indigenous, and theatres of color (BITOC) provides distinct insights into the opportunities and challenges these theatres face.
Total expenses rose 12% from 2022 to 2023.
Staffing levels remained significantly lower than pre-pandemic figures show.
what i read this week
Amanda Hess’ feature on the Broadway production of John Proctor is the Villain (NYT, gift link) which includes this exquisite rundown of everything I love about the play:
A prismatic revelation: “John Proctor is the Villain” is, at turns, a literary critique, a tender bildungsroman, a loopy comedy, a study of rural America and a Taylor Swift appreciation post.
American Theatre’s Stuart Miller on the ongoing Atlantic Theater labor strike and increased unionization efforts at non-profits nationwide:
Dan Little, a labor organizer with IATSE, understands that the stakes are high for those sitting across the table from his union’s negotiators. Most theatres are still struggling, losing money, moving locations, and staging fewer and smaller productions.
[…] But he says those in power sometimes seem to have forgotten that their theatres can’t operate without the people his union is representing—or at least forgotten that their needs and ideas matter.
“Theatres are having meaningful conversations with themselves, but unfortunately a lot of those conversations seem to happen with the folks at the top of the organizations, talking about it with their boards of directors and trustees,” Little said. “It can take hundreds of people to produce a play: the actors, the musicians, the production employees, but also the ticket sellers and the ushers and everyone who contributes. They’ve often been left out of the conversation and are simply told what’s going to happen. But they want to be part of that conversation too.”