the week of november 8-14, 2024

next on sick sad world

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icymi: bills, bills, bills #30

This month’s money diary is from a PhD student living on a $16,200 teaching stipend and rehearsing choreography for Sweet Charity:

bills, bills, bills #30

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world premieres

• The Civilians’ Sex Variants of 1941 runs November 14-24 at NYU Skirball. The “kaleidoscopic fantasia adapted from a medical study of queer sexuality” was co-conceived by writer/director Steve Cosson, James La Bella, and multimedia artist Jessica Mitrani.

• Beth Piatote's Antíkoni starts performances November 8th at Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles. Madeline Sayet directs the “timely retelling of a Greek classic that makes us question what role museums have in caring for the dead.”

productions

• Jocelyn Bioh’s Jaja's African Hair Braiding starts performances November 8th at Berkeley Rep in a co-pro with Arena Stage, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and La Jolla Playhouse. Whitney White directs the comedy set “amidst the lively buzz of a scorching summer, [where] love ignites, dreams soar, and secrets unravel at a beloved Harlem hotspot where West African immigrant braiders work their magic on the locals’ locks.”

• Fred Alley and James Kaplan’s Lumberjacks in Love runs November 8 - January 12 at Milwaukee Rep. Jeff Herbst directs the “flannel-clad musical taking us to the Northwoods in 1912, where a camp of burly lumberjacks revel in their bachelor lives — until a special delivery named Rose shows up and flips their lives around like a flapjack.”

• Jillian Snow & David Saffert’s Liberace & Liza: Holiday at the Mansion (A Tribute) starts performances November 10th at Portland Center Stage in Oregon. The “exhilarating night of musical and comical fireworks bringing two icons to life” is directed by Chip Miller.

• David Auburn’s Summer, 1976 starts performances November 13th at Studio Theatre in DC. Vivienne Benesch directs the drama about “two very different women thrown into one another’s orbit in college-town Ohio.”

• Jen Silverman’s The Roommate is now playing through November 17th at Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. The dark comedy about an “unlikely duo's lives in shared dish-duty and shady business” is directed by Rebekah Scallet.

festivals

• The 2024 BAM Next Wave Festival

  • Tiago Rodrigues’ Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists runs November 13 -17. Rodrigues also directs the “courageous, compelling work about a Portuguese family gathering at their country house for an annual ritual: the execution of a fascist.”

  • Guillermo Cacace’s Gaviota runs November 13-23. Juan Ignacio Fernández’s Spanish-language adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull is “an emotionally charged, stripped down interpretation, where five actresses sit around an oversized table and offer an extremely intimate presentation of the Russian playwright’s spectacle of waste.”

workshops & readings

• Irene Kirstein Watts’ Goodbye Marianne will have readings on November 9 & 10 at The Goodman Theatre in partnership with the Illinois Holocaust Museum. Raquel Torre directs the drama “based on the playwright’s experience as a child in Nazi Germany immediately after the November Pogroms.”

• Irish Repertory Theatre’s New Works Fall Festival continues through November 18th. This week’s readings include Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap (November 11, directed by Matt Torney) and Clare McMahon’s The Gap Year (November 12, directed by Nicola Murphy Dubey).

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award season

• Naomi Iizuka is the recipient of the 2024-2025 Hermitage Award. Iizuka will receive “a cash prize of $35,000, a residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida, and a developmental workshop in Chicago in late 2026.”

assorted

• Emory University’s Playwriting Fellowship is now accepting applicants. The two-year program offers a “$50,000 salary, health benefits, $1,000 annual travel fund, 2-1 teaching load, and various development opportunities.” (It also offers Kimberly Belflower as a colleague.)

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a note on this week

I don’t think you should look to a niche theatre newsletter author for astute political commentary. I haven’t read anything particularly helpful or wise this week, but I dipped out of the post-election hot take cycle. The best analysis synthesizes myriad forms of reporting (data, theory, interviews) and that takes time.

The most useful advice I received after the 2016 election was to pick one cause I cared about and direct my time, money, and resources toward it. (The more local, the better.) I started donating and fundraising for DC Abortion Fund, which I still do today. Trump and his craven acolytes operate in permanent chaos mode, hijacking every news cycle with their latest human rights violation. Refusing to be overwhelmed by a fascist vision board and channeling my energy toward one issue was a practical solution at the time.

But this isn’t 2016 — this is worse. The gravitational pull of despair is real. I don’t think you need to finalize your multi-year opposition plan right now. I’m constantly questioning, unraveling, and remaking my own instincts on how to combat the imminent wreckage, but I’d rather feel uncertain than numb. Supporting existing movements, accumulating small actions, and rethinking my community obligations are beating back the creep of fatalism. (For now.)