the week of october 27 - november 2, 2023

a building is not a theatre's greatest asset

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

productions

• The world premiere of Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s adaptation of Grounded starts October 28th at Washington National Opera in a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera. Based on Brant’s award-winning play, Michael Mayer directs the new opera starring mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo as a “fighter-pilot battling the moral implications and psychological effects of virtual warfare.”

• Xavier Clark’s backstroke boys runs October 27 - November 4 at Fault Line Theater in NYC. Sivan Battat directs the new work about the budding relationship between two high school swim team members and the “perils of young love colliding with faith and family.”

• Eisa Davis’ Bulrusher starts previews October 27th at Berkeley Rep. The 1955-set lyrical coming-of-age story about a clairvoyant orphan “feeling her small-town world closing in around her, until a mysterious Black girl from Alabama arrives harboring a secret, awakening new discoveries and uncovering old truths” is directed by Nicole A. Watson.

• Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul starts previews October 27th at InterAct in Philadelphia. The “tense drama tracing the human cost of U.S. immigration policy and the legacy of our longest war” is directed by Jude Sandy.

• Steven Epp, Dominique Serrand, Nathan Keepers’ Say All The Truth starts previews October 27th at The Jungle Theater in Minneapolis. Serrand also directs the “playful, fragile, heart wrenching, incendiary” adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope, which is a co-production with the Moving Company.

• The world premiere of Megan Tabaque’s Decapitations runs October 28 - November 5 at Salvage Vanguard in Austin, TX. Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw directs the “surreal, funny, and haunting diasporic ghost story about a multi-racial Filipino-American family.”

• Melinda Lopez and Maurice Emmanuel Parent’s Mr. Parent starts performances November 1st at Geva Theatre in Rochester, NY. The solo performance about “crushingly inequitable systems, the brilliance of every kid, and how we might all find the space to be ourselves” was conceived with and directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian.

• Alexandra Tatarsky’s Sad Boys in Harpy Land runs November 2 - 26 at Playwrights Horizons. Iris McCloughan directs the “unhinged solo performance collaging narratives of artmaking and despair into a semi-autobiographical tour-de-farce…equal parts sad clown, demented cabaret, and extended crisis of meaning.”

• The world premiere of Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap starts previews November 2nd at Solas Nua. The Belfast-set drama exploring the Troubles through the lens of an American oral history project that spins out of control is directed by Matt Torney.

• Geoff Sobelle’s FOOD runs November 2 - 18 at BAM Next Wave Festival. The performance artist’s “tour-de-force of audience manipulation, hallucinatory sleight-of-hand, and physical comedy” — co-created with Steve Cuiffo and co-directed by Lee Sunday Evans — is an “absurdist, immersive, and rigorously designed meditation on how we eat, what’s in the soup, and who pays the bill."

digital

• The Roundabout Refocus Project: Year Three readings are now available to stream on demand through November 19th. The Refocus Project is an initiative to “elevate and restore marginalized plays to the American canon”; this year’s series highlighted Asian American and Pacific Islander playwrights. The featured plays are Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s Ola Nā Iwi (The Bones Live) (directed by cara hinh), Anuvab Pal's Chaos Theory (directed by Arita Mukherjee), Prince Gomolvilas’ Big Hunk o’ Burnin’ Love (directed by Eric Ting), and Velina Haas Houston's Tea (directed by Jess McLeod).

• The inaugural From-Home Fest runs October 28 - November 5. The mini-festival of online and telephone theatre features Happenstance Theater’s Juxtapose Tenement, an interactive website “inspired by the works of Joseph Cornell and featuring vintage spectacle, physical theatre and theatrical clown”; Phoenix Tears Productions’ one-on-one telephone horror show The Ritual; Anna Lathrop, Deb Sivigny, and Tia Shearer Bassett’s live Zoom show of poet Kenneth Koch’s wild, out-of-order love story Edward and Christine; Tristan Willis’ live multimedia performance in a way that matters; and a live, interactive workshop production CirqueSaw’s Void Main.

• Richard Nelson’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Little Comedies is available to livestream October 27-29 from the Alley Theatre. Nelson also directs the five one-act comedies — Swan Song, The Bear, The Proposal, The Wedding, and On The Harmfulness of Tobacco — newly co-translated with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

• Gage Tarlton’s xXPonyBoyDerekXx is available online on OnlyFans. The “incendiary coming-of-age story detailing how the internet distorts reality and leaves a mark on the young and on-line body” is told through OnlyFans and X (formerly known as Twitter) posts and co-directed by Tarlton and Carlos Cardona.

readings

• Jesús I. Valles’ BATHHOUSE.PPTX will receive a staged reading on October 30th at the Flea Theater. Chay Yew directs the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize winner, a “meditation on queer longing, queer grief, and all our queer worlds that will come to pass, that will come to be.” BATHHOUSE.PPTX is the first recipient of The Flea’s production commission program, an open call program that provides a finishing commission and full production to an experimental new work by a Black, brown or queer artist.

festivals

• The Latinx New Play Festival runs October 27-29 at La Jolla Playhouse. The festival, which originally launched in 2016 at the now-shuttered San Diego Rep, features public readings of four works-in-progress: Karina Billini’s Apple Bottom (directed by Amelia Acosta Powell), Jessi Realz and Marilet Martinez’s The Invocation of Selena (directed by Cambria Herrera), Benjamin Benne’s Manning (directed by Cat Rodríguez), and Iraisa Ann Reilly’s The Jersey Devil Is A Papi Chulo (directed by Dr. Maria Patrice Amon).

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2023-24 season updates

• Long Wharf Theater announced its spring 2024 productions. The itinerant New Haven company will produce Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (directed by James Dean Palmer) and Adil Mansoor’s Amm(i)gone (co-directed by Mansoor and Lyam B. Gabel).

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signs of the times

• Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, OR laid off its artistic director Jeanette Harrison. The decision comes two months after the company canceled its 2023-24 season and reduced its staff from 10 to six full-time employees. (Harrison only joined Artists Rep a year ago.) The theatre plans to resume production in 2024-25 — after it finishes fundraising for the $30 million in-progress renovations on its space. As the Board wrote, “With resources being carefully allocated towards the completion of our newly renovated venue, ART finds itself at a juncture that calls for strategic adjustments in the leadership structure.”

  
  I’m not excusing the messaging here — prioritizing your building over your newly appointed artistic director is bleak, no matter how “amicable” the departure — but this is ultimately a structural funding problem. Large-scale renovation projects are financed by years-in-the-making capital campaigns. Those funds are restricted and can’t be repurposed to cover general operating costs, like staff salaries. (We’ve seen many examples of this since the start of the pandemic: Maltz Jupiter moved ahead with a $30 million expansion while 80% of its staff was furloughed in 2020; The Public Theater laid off 19% of its full-time staff one month before the start of the Delacorte Theater’s $77 million renovation, Lookingglass cut its full-time staff in half and paused all programming until spring 2024 — but continued its state-funded lobby renovation, and Studio Theatre broke ground on a $20 million renovation in 2021, less than a year after laying off yours truly, among others.)

  
  Artists Repertory Theatre’s predicament is yet another testament to the field’s broken economics. I want to be clear that not all renovations are architectural vanity projects; it’s critical to upgrade facilities to rectify safety concerns, obsolete technology, and accessibility issues. But I’m tired of foundations, corporations, governments, and major donors incentivizing physical expansions instead of funneling money towards stabilizing existing operations and compensation. A building is not a theatre’s greatest asset. If you can’t afford to program plays, pay artists, or retain a staff beyond a burnt-out skeleton crew, you’re just erecting an expensive shell.