the week of november 22 - 30, 2024

happy holidays from jane austen & roland schimmelpfennig

You’re reading Nothing for the Group, a newsletter where one dramaturg rounds up one week in theatre news, reviews, and takes. If you like this sort of thing:

The Friday weekly round-up is always free, but if you’d like to sustain this project (and get access to occasional bonus content), you can upgrade to a paid tier. (You can also support via Venmo @halvorsen or Paypal.)

If you want to say hi (or send me a press release), you can email me or follow Nothing for the Group on Instagram.

Graphic Design: Elizabeth Morton | Editorial Support: Ryan Adelsheim

No newsletter next week because somehow it is already Thanksgiving. (The weekly round-up will return on December 6th.) I’m spending the holiday in NYC and I will have time to see exactly one play, unless I’m persuaded to watch Encanto multiple times. (I do not crave the love and approval of anyone except my friends’ toddlers.) Anyway, I am open to show recommendations, so let me know if anything is truly can’t-miss.

---

world premieres

• Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile starts performances November 30th at Arena Stage in DC. Hana S. Sharif directs the mystery about the famed detective Hercule Poirot “becoming entangled in a web of deceit and desire aboard a cruise ship on the Nile River.”

• Craig Lucas’ A Whynot Christmas Carol runs November 26 - December 24 at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. The new holiday comedy following “a small-town theater troupe’s quest to put on a great show with too little time and money but no shortage of opinions” is directed by Pam Mackinnon.

productions

• Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Winter Solstice runs November 23 - December 14 at Rec Room Arts in Houston. The “dark holiday comedy where family dysfunction runs deeper” is directed by Bradley Michalakis.

• Twelfth Night, Or What You Will starts performances November 24th at Portland Center Stage in Oregon. Marissa Wolf directs the Shakespearean comedy of “disguises, mistaken identities and unrequited love.”

• Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day starts performances November 25th at Manhattan Theatre Club on Broadway. Anna D. Shapiro directs the comedy set at “a private California elementary school with a Board of Directors that values inclusion above all else—that is, until an outbreak of the mumps forces everyone in the community to reconsider the school’s liberal vaccine policy.”

• Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit starts performances November 29th at Seattle Rep. Allison Narver directs the classic farce about a “novelist caught in a supernatural love triangle after a scatterbrained psychic accidentally summons the spirit of his late wife—which infuriates his current wife.”

• Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joe Masteroff’s She Loves Me runs November 30 - December 15 as part of Long Wharf Theater’s season. The reimagined production staged at The Lab at ConnCORP “takes you to 1930s Budapest, a city full of romance, longing, and change” and is directed by Jacob G. Padrón.

• Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s The Wickhams: Christmas at Pemberley runs November 30 - December 22 at City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh. Kyle Haden directs the duo’s second continuation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice which finds the servants of Pemberley “in the midst of a holiday scandal, as Mr. Wickham — the uninvited husband of Lydia and sworn enemy of Mr. Darcy — appears in the middle of the night.”

• The ArtsCentric production of Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity starts performances November 30th at Baltimore Center Stage. The “the joyous retelling of how Jesus came into this world, seen through a unique African American kaleidoscope” is directed by Kevin S. McAllister.

• Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt runs November 30 - December 29 at DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company in a co-pro with The Huntington. Carey Perloff directs the drama about “a Jewish family growing and struggling over the course of nearly 60 years, beginning with their initial assimilation into Viennese culture, negotiating the outbreak of two World Wars through to the aftermath of the Holocaust.”

• Christina Baldwin, Sun Mee Chomet, and Jim Lichtscheidl’s Dinner for One starts performances November 30th at The Jungle Theater in Minneapolis. The “hilarious story of a dutiful butler helping his employer celebrate her birthday, complete with unpredictable mishaps, a little too much wine, and enchanting live music” is directed by Christina Baldwin.

workshops & readings

• David Anzuelo and Nate Dobson’s A Boy Called Lobo will have a public workshop presentation November 22-24 at INTAR Theatre in NYC. Rudy Ramírez directs the “part interactive TED Talk and part musical fable about a boy who is on a quest to recover his languages and make peace with his dual nature.”

festivals

• Theater Mu’s New Eyes Festival runs November 22-24 at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. The annual showcase of new Asian-American work includes staged readings of Samah Meghjee’s Maybe You Could Love Me (directed by Katie Bradley), Ankita Raturi’s Fifty Boxes of Earth (directed by Pirronne Yousefzadeh), and Brian Dang’s Grandmother/Bathtub (directed by Rich Remedios).

---

the regional theatre game of thrones

• Raymond O. Caldwell is the next artistic director of the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles. The director (and total delight) most recently led DC’s socially-conscious Theater Alliance for five years. He succeeds co-founding leader Stephen Sachs, who will step down next March.

---

calls to action

• Sign An Open Letter to Keep DC’s SOURCE Theater A Performing Arts Space

  The SOURCE Theater, one of DC’s few remaining black box spaces for itinerant theatre companies, is up for sale. Theatre Washington has written an open letter to the building’s owners, Cultural DC, encouraging them to sell the SOURCE to an organization that will maintain it as a theatre. (14th Street does not need any more luxury condos or upscale furniture stores!)

• the wild project is raising money to buy its East Village space by February 2025.
  The company dedicated to emerging, independent, underrepresented, downtown artists needs to raise an additional one million dollars to purchase the building, otherwise it will “likely be sold to the highest bidder, forcing another beloved downtown performing arts space to close.”

---

in memoriam

• The legendary dramaturg Morgan Jenness died last week at age 72. (NYT gift link) I didn’t know Morgan well, but their work and advocacy was an aspirational career blueprint for me as young dramaturg. I love this passage from an interview with Morgan about her practice in Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book (courtesy of Janice Paran):

  “I had always looked at a play as a living thing or a moving entity. I tried to feel where the flow was, where the dams were, almost as if it were a river that surged and eddied in different paths. Where something seemed to block that flow, wherever the energy was stopped, that was the obstacle to what was possible, what needed work. It was not some sort of mechanical edifice to fix according to a rule book. Milcha Sanchez-Scott said to me once about the way I worked, ‘Morgan, you put the play on like a coat, and you live inside it like another skin, and you say, ‘Oh, this feels tight here,’ and speak from inside the play.”

• The Chicago-based arts journalist Kris Vire died earlier this week at age 47 after a year-long battle with metastatic cancer. The long-time Time Out Chicago critic and Arts and Culture Editor of Chicago Magazine was a true champion of storefront and independent theatres. As a literary manager (and now as a niche newsletter author) trying to understand the nuances of a city’s theatrical ecosystem from a distance, his writing and perspective was invaluable to me over the last decade.