the week of may 6 - 12, 2023

fornés and her friends

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

productions

• Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance runs May 16 - June 25 at Signature Theatre in NYC. The world premiere about a self-proclaimed “Multi-Ethnic Reject Group” gathering to pre-game for their 20th high school reunion as “death looms over and speaks through them, describing their disquieting and darkly comedic fates” is directed by Eric Ting.

• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street starts performances May 16th at Signature Theatre in Virginia. Sarna Lapine directs Stephen Sondheim’s macabre masterpiece, which is part of Signature’s season-long tribute to the late composer’s work.

• nora chipaumire’s Nehanda runs May 17-21 at Arts Emerson in Boston. The genre-bending contemporary opera and concert experience is a “pulsing, magnetic exploration of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle.”

• The world premiere of John J. Caswell Jr.’s Wet Brain starts previews May 17th at Playwrights Horizons. Dustin Wills directs the “transfixing story of a family mining the depths of loss, traveling lightyears to find a language for closure.”

• The world premiere of Wesley Du’s Hong Kong Mississippi is now playing through May 14th at La MaMa. Du also performs the solo work about “a Chinese boy on a hero's journey to find his own voice in a world filled with abuse and racism”; Craig Belknap directs.

• Evelyn Brown (A Diary), a lost work by María Irene Fornés, runs May 19 - June 4 at LaMaMa. Alice Reagan directs the “intimate meditation exploring the physical cost of women’s domestic labor and the surprising possibilities for mental and spiritual escape”, which was recovered by dramaturg Gwendolyn Alker over the last five years.

festivals

• ruth tang’s Work Hard Have Fun Make History runs May 18-30 as part of Clubbed Thumb Summerworks. Caitlin Sullivan directs the “catalog of all the possible phone calls that exist — a play that is not about Amazon, not about Jeff Bezos and certainly not about Elon Musk.”

• The 2023 Momentum Festival of New Plays runs May 18-21 at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre Company. Public readings include Martin Giles’ Bar Joke Tales (directed by Marc Masterson), Inda Craig-Galván’s Berth Breach/Breech Birth (directed by Kyle Haden), Tami Dixon’s South Side Stories Revisited, and the documentary film When My Sleeping Dragon Woke (directed by Chuck Schultz and Judah-Lev Dickstein.)

• The Cleveland Play House’s New Ground Theatre Festival is now running through May 18th. This year’s readings include Phillip Christian Smith’s Comedy, Errors, Vanity, and Stupidity; Tanya Saracho’s Fade; Caroline V. Graw’s Louder; Eric Coble’s The First Snow of Summer; May Treuhaft-Ali’s Escapegoat; and Andrew Rosendorf’s One-Shot.

streaming

• María Irene Fornés’ adaptation of Life Is A Dream will livestream on May 13 & 14 from Baltimore Center Stage. Stevie Walker-Webb directs the reimagined version of Calderón’s revered 17th-century play.

• The Playwrights’ Center 2023 Playlabs Festival readings are available to stream on demand May 15-21. The featured works are Franky D. Gonzalez’s That Must Be The Entrance to Heaven, AriDy Nox’s A Walless Church: The Black Woman’s Guide To Making God, and Andrew Rosendorf’s Stockade.

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2023-24 season

• Playwrights Horizons announced its 2023-24 season. The line-up includes three world premieres: Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s musical Teeth (directed by Sarah Benson), David Adjmi’s Stereophonic (songs by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler and directed by Daniel Aukin), Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal (directed by Morgan Green), plus a repertory of three solo performances: Milo Cramer’s School Pictures, Alexandra Tatarsky’s Sad Boys in Harpy Land, and Ikechukwu Ufomadu’s Amusements.

• Folger Theatre announced its upcoming season. The DC company will present The Winter’s Tale (directed by Tamilla Woodard), Madeline Sayet’s Where We Belong (directed by Mei Ann Teo), Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses (directed by Psalmayene 24), and The Reading Room Festival, which features new works and conversations inspired by or in response to the plays of Shakespeare.

• Chicago Shakespeare Theater announced its 2023-24 season. The theatre will produce Twelfth Night (directed by Tyrone Phillips), Stewart Melton and Finn Anderson’s Islander: A New Musical (conceived and directed by Amy Draper), Sufjan Stevens’ musical Illinois (story by Jackie Sibblies Drury and Justin Peck, who also choreographs and directs), Richard III (directed by Edward Hall), David Kwong’s The Enigmatist, and the world premiere of Rob Ulin’s Judgment Day (directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel).

• McCarter Theatre Center announced its 2023-24 season. The Princeton, NJ theatre’s line-up includes Eisa Davis' Bulrusher (directed by Nicole A. Watson, co-pro with Berkeley Rep); the original London production of Stephen Mallatratt’s The Woman in Black (directed by Robin Herford); Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change (directed by Lili-Anne Brown); and Winnie Holzman’s Choice (directed by Sarah Rasmussen).

• The O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, CT announced its 2023 line-up. The selected plays are jose sebastian alberdi’s bogfriends, Jan Rosenberg’s Pluck, a.k payne’s Love I Awethu Further, Alex Lin’s Chinese Republicans, Collin Van Son’s Natural History, and Liba Vaynberg’s The Matriarchs.

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the regional theatre game of thrones

• Nataki Garrett resigned as artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Garrett took over the 88-year-old destination theatre in 2019. Her tenure was marked with numerous challenges and inexcusable attacks on her safety: devastating wildfires, the coronavirus pandemic, leadership shake-ups and staff layoffs, racist pushback to her artistic programming, and death threats. Garrett recounted an early meeting with a high-level donor:

  “In my first year, a donor told me that I was the reason she rescinded a large gift,” said Garrett. “She came to me and told me to my face, and she said, ‘I want to make sure you know it’s not because you’re Black. But there are things about the organization that you just don’t understand, and you have big shoes to fill.’ I was like, ‘Thank you for letting me know where you stand.’ I went to my development team and said, ‘We’re gonna have to pivot.’ And then the crisis happened. You can’t really build the plane and fly it at the same time.”

  An emergency fundraising campaign was announced last month in order to launch and complete the current season. (OSF’s financial problems are not new; it was reported last month that the theater had discovered “extensive accounting issues” dating back several years, the result of “antiquated systems that were not properly maintained.”) The board will assume administrative duties for the company, while board member and playwright Octavio Solis will lead the artistic transition.

  
  In a statement, Garrett spoke about her hope for OSF’s future — and the future of the American theatre:

  When I was first appointed I was very clear that I came for the opportunity to do the real work and to impact the change necessary to evolve the theater and help it build towards a more inclusive future. My focus has always been and will always be THE WORK.
  

  In that spirit, I am leaving with an eye on the future of the field. We all know that while our doors have reopened, the world is not the same. We are at an inflection point in our industry, where outdated business models must evolve in order for our theaters to survive. But these challenges also pose great opportunities—to rebuild in a way that reflects where we are today and where we want to be in the future—with actors, staff, audiences, and artistic leaders who reflect the richness of our country’s diversity. This is what excites me. This is the work I came to do.
  

  This has been my mandate and will continue to be my mandate as I work in the industry. I look forward to following your continued success and working in partnership with you to forge a better future for American Theatre.

• Mark Lamos is stepping down as artistic director of Westport Country Playhouse in January 2024. He has led the Connecticut theatre since 2009.

• Matt M. Morrow is the new artistic director of Center Repertory Theatre in Walnut Creek, CA. Morrow has spent the last eight years as executive artistic director of San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre. Center REP, a city-owned-and-run theatre, hasn’t employed a full-time artistic director since it laid off Michael Butler during the pandemic shutdown in 2020.

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award season

• Sanaz Toossi’s English won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The drama about four Iranian adults preparing for an English language exam premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company last spring and recently won the OBIE Award for Best New American Play. (Toossi was navigating SFO airport security yesterday when the Pulitzers were announced; she told the NYT that when her agent called with the good news: “I asked, ‘Are you sure?’ And when she said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Could you please just double-check?’”.) The finalists were Aleshea Harris' On Sugarland and Lloyd Suh's The Far Country.

• The 2023 Lucille Lortel Awards were announced. Hansol Jung's Wolf Play received five awards, including Outstanding Play, Director, and Ensemble, while the musical Titaníque won three. Actor Stephen McKinley Henderson received the Lifetime Achievement Award.

• The 2023 New York Drama Critics Circle Awards were announced. Bruce Norris’ Downstate won Best Play, while Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt received Best Foreign Play. (The committee did not name a Best Musical winner.) Adrienne Kennedy — who made her long-overdue Broadway debut at age 91 last year with Ohio State Murders — was honored with a lifetime achievement citation.

• Tania El Khoury and Whitney White are the winners of the 2023 Alpert Awards for Theatre. The two multidisciplinary artists will each receive a $75,000 unrestricted prize and a CalArts residency.

• Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home is the winner of the 2023 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award. The $25,000 prize award “recognizes an outstanding script that premiered professionally outside of New York City in 2022.” (The play premiered at Berkeley Rep and has subsequently been produced by The Goodman and Yale Rep.)

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what i read this week

• Jared Strange’s American Theatre feature on the outgoing cohort of the rotating DC playwrights collective The Welders, who reflect back on the invention, tumult, and growth of their three-year tenure, which began in January 2020 and was immediately complicated by the pandemic.

• San Francisco Chronicle’s Lily Janiak on how the Bay Area-based Playwrights Foundation is restructuring to forefront flexibility and writers’ needs.

• Shortly before the WGA strike began on May 2nd, someone on Twitter shared playwright and Dickinson creator Alena Smith’s 2014 LA Review of Books essay “You Can’t Make a Living: Digital Media, the End of TV’s Golden Age, and the Death Scene of the American Playwright”, which is an incredibly prescient take on how the internet and streaming studios would devalue screenwriters, just like the economic ruin of playwriting as a profession:

  We don’t write plays for the money — because there is no money anymore. We do it for something else, which I guess we can call love. But, frequently, it doesn’t feel like love. It feels like pain. Working in a demonetized profession is a situation fraught with despair. Everyone in the 21st-century theater community is suffering, because there simply aren’t enough resources to go around. The artists suffer. The work suffers. And people quit. Not because they want to, not because they’ve made their best work or have run out of inspiration, but because they have to. We grow up. You can’t feed your family on love.