For this year’s survey of what theatre insiders are looking forward to in the coming season, we asked folks who work for theatres located in our nation’s capital cities: What show or program at your theatre most exemplifies that way the American theatre has changed? And what play not at your theatre are you most looking forward to seeing, even if you have to travel to see it?
Home: Not a Place But a Feeling
We are in an American moment where taking the safe, cautious path forward can be appealing. But when you live in Atlanta, the bedrock of the Civil Rights Movement and the beacon for a New South, we must aspire to create a path that may be unchartered but promises radical liberty and equality for all.
I am so excited about the future of the Alliance Theatre. We are proclaiming a season of joy and serve a mandate to harness our collective longing for significance, for celebration, for wonder and stand on the audacious aspirations of Atlanta’s Civil Rights dreamers to rebuild a world we all want to belong to. We will bear witness to the trials and pain life can bring but underscore the profound hope and joy of living in possibility.
This theme is most dynamically captured with our world premiere of The Many Wondrous Realities of Jasmine Starr-Kidd by Alliance-Kendeda National Playwriting Winner Stephen Brown, next spring. This is about a 12-year-old bi-racial girl who invents a time machine so she can travel back and save her parents’ marriage. This story confronts the necessary contingency of accidents and moments of decision that define the life we have. But the entry point of this story is “home.” Not a place, but a feeling. At a time when the American theatre must wrestle with how well we are holding up our origin story—a home for every American dialogue—this play speaks directly to where I want to be headed: a place where diversity is a given, not a plot point; where children turn their depression into imagination, not destruction; and where the magic of women is universally believed.
I am so inspired by my colleague Jamil Jude and the transformational witnessing of a people’s legacy he offers the Southeast region at Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre. Their curation of the Sankofa Seasons focus on preserving and uplifting the belief of the Akan people of Ghana: that the knowledge of the past must not be forgotten as time and journeys move forward.
Tinashe Kajese Bolden, co-associate artistic director (co-interim artistic lead), Alliance Theatre in Atlanta
Getting in the Room and Hitting the Road
The last time I was in a theatre outside of Boise and/or BCT was in January 2020, when I had the great good fortune of seeing Dance Nation at Steppenwolf. Which is to say, at this point I’d be excited to see a terrible remount of some children’s musical if it meant I could be in another theatre as the lights dim and an excited quiet descends. Aiming slightly higher, I’d like to get to Seattle to see Is This A Room at Seattle Rep. I love Tom Stoppard (and his brain), so Leopoldstadt is super high on my list. As is Signature Theatre’s A Bright New Boise because…ummmm…the title? Plus, Sam Hunter is an Idaho native, so I jump at any chance I get to see his beautiful work.
For some reason, there is an artistic and friends pipeline from Boise to Philadelphia. We’ve had many playwrights, directors, and actors join us for our BIPOC Playwrights Festival as well as on our mainstage. So I’d like to visit my friends in Philly at InterAct, the Lantern, the Wilma, etc., to see what they’re all up to. The place is bursting with talent and good people, so I’d like to see firsthand what’s in the water… er…wooder.
Benjamin Burdick, artistic director, Boise Contemporary Theatre in Boise, Idaho
Connecting With Open Minds
Like many theatre companies, Short North Stage continued to entertain our audiences in whatever way we could during the pandemic. We produced virtual and socially distant theatre, and were even one of the first AEA-approved in-person projects with our virtual production of Bad Jews, in which the director and cast quarantined and filmed the play in a house. The pandemic gave us an opportunity to reconnect with our audience and artists in a different way, and those conversations enriched our ability to program the kind of theater they wanted to see and perform on our stage.
I would say the project that most exemplifies the change in American theatre would be our upcoming production of Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris. We will be one of the first regional theatres in the country to produce this provocative play, but we feel Columbus audiences will welcome it, and are unlikely to get the opportunity otherwise. The conversations in Slave Play are revolutionary, daring, and essential. Our Columbus patrons have open minds for theatre that stimulates conversation and debate about difficult themes. Slave Play will also feature our first creative team of entirely Black artists, helmed by Nakeisha Daniel, which we are very excited about. We have listened and learned that simple things like bias training for all casts, intimacy coaching, trigger warnings, and providing breakout safe spaces for theatregoers can help us produce challenging theatre effectively for a modern audience. I cannot wait to attend the talkbacks for this play especially!
I am most excited to see the productions of Everybody at the Cleveland Play House and Available Light Theatre in Columbus. I love Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s work, and have not had the opportunity to catch this play yet. I think it is very cool, and also a sign of a new era in regional theatre, that this February in Columbus, you can see two engaging new plays by exciting queer Black playwrights, Jeremy O. Harris and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. It gives me hope that one day our city will become a consistent source of diverse destination theatre.
I also plan to travel to the D.C. area a few times this year to catch Signature Theatre Company‘s Sondheim trilogy of Into the Woods, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd. Short North Stage is engaging in an evocative new vision for Woods later this spring, and I have not seen Pacific Overtures since the last Broadway revival. Sweeney remains one of my favorites. It is a very exciting line up. I love Signature’s work and I find their innovative takes on musical theatre to be some of the best in the country.
Edward Carignan, artistic director, Short North Stage in Columbus, Ohio
Lifting Latine Voices, Back to Boston
Hartford Stage, under Melia Bensussen’s artistic leadership, is producing more plays told by and/or featuring members of the Latine community (Quixote Nuevo by Octavio Solis, Pike St. by Nilaja Sun, the new musical Kiss My, Aztec! by John Leguizamo, Benjamin Velez, and David Kamp, and a virtual American Voices New Play festival that featured work by Latinx writers including Georgina Escobar, Martín Zimmerman, and Christina Pumariega). Many of these plays featured Spanish-language elements or Spanglish as part of the storytelling, and in our upcoming season, we are producing Espjeos: Clean by Christina Quintana, which will be told entirely in English and Spanish with supertitles (one character speaks Spanish, the other English). It’s exciting to think about the intersection of technology and cross-language storytelling.
Outside Hartford, it has been such a treat to be so close to an old stomping ground of mine, Boston. I am eager to see the newly renovated theatre at the Huntington and to celebrate Loretta Greco’s first full season with August Wilson’s masterpiece Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. I performed at the Huntington in my 20s, and the theatre has always held a special place for me. I will also say that after having produced Pearl Cleage’s Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous at Hartford Stage last season, I want to see all her work! I was thrilled to see that the renowned Penumbra Theatre is producing her play What I Learned in Paris. St. Paul is another old stomping ground—and if I could hop on a plane during its run, I would visit!
Cynthia Rider, managing director, Hartford Stage in Hartford, Ct.
Salt and Seeing
At Honolulu Theatre for Youth, we are proud to represent the diverse communities of Hawai’i. It is more important than ever to make space for representation and voice, especially as the entire theatre community grapples with change. We are opening our 68th season with a beautiful new show centered around the Native Hawaiian practice of cultivating and giving paʻakai (salt). We are reflecting about how to respectfully engage with different communities and share our work. It is our hope that our work becomes a bridge that helps healing and growth.
I am personally excited to see live theatre again. I would love to see a production of Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady. His script, layered with history and trauma past and present, makes me think and feel seen.
Reiko Ho, marketing director, Honolulu Theatre for Youth in Honolulu, Hawaii
Authenticity and Energy
It’s so hard to pick one show that exemplifies the way the American theatre is changing. So much of what is changing in American theatre is how we approach how we are telling stories as a whole. I could pick our production of Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen was ahead of her time in the way she approached telling the stories of women in her world. And the fact that we can still relate to these women says a lot about where we are now. The cast is diverse, but so is our artistic team. The chance to work with Dawn Chiang was incredible, and Michael Keck’s score is so beautiful.
But I could also pick either our production of The Chinese Lady or Flying West. The stories of communities that have been ostracized throughout history, told by members of those communities, is so important. We aren’t in a place anymore where it is acceptable to tell these stories while we exclude those communities from the room. A story without an authentic voice is hollow, and our audiences recognize that.
As for shows outside my theatre, I so wish I could get out to see Come Fall in Love at the Old Globe right now. There is a reason why Bollywood is so popular! To have that story with that energy in a live space must be incredible.
Malia Arguello, production manager, Indiana Repertory Theatre in Indianapolis
Understudies and Homegrown Stories
A positive aspect of the challenges of the past few years is the strengthening of our understudy program. The process exemplifies the way American theatre is changing for the internal workings of our company. We have always cast understudies, but I felt we were sometimes too casual about their importance and need. Faced with the potential challenge of artists missing multiple days due to illness, we met the challenge by overhauling our understudy system and increasing the overall number of stand-ins and swings for each production. This expands our opportunity to invest in more artists. To meet the expense this created, we have scheduled more smaller-cast shows than usual for the 2022-23 season. But we do have a few large ensemble shows in the season, which will end up being more expensive than they would have been in the past.
Another unseen benefit for New Stage Theatre caused by the pandemic is a stronger and more intense focus on original, “homegrown” productions. At the beginning of the COVID crisis, we programmed virtual and streaming new and original work on demand, produced through our Mississippi Plays Series. So much of the work in the Mississippi Plays Series is naturally focused on Civil Rights issues, and this aligned with the nationwide conversation at the time. The response to the plays’ content, and the changes taking place in the American theatre landscape, encouraged a continued focus on this programming once we returned to in-person performances. This past season we worked on the development a new musical play about Mississippi blues musician Bobby Rush, titled Slippin’ Through the Cracks: The Blues Journey of Bobby Rush. For our 2022-23 season I am most looking forward to producing a fully staged production of the show next August.
There are so many plays that I am excited about in states that border us, and even a little bit further away. I hope that I will be able to travel to see Jubilee by Tazewell Thompson at Alabama Shakespeare Festival; Clyde’s by Lynn Nottage at either Arkansas Repertory or Alabama Shakespeare Festival; Chicken & Biscuits by Douglas Lyons at TheatreSquared; Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at the NOLA Project; and The Hot Wing King by Katori Hall at the Alliance Theatre.
Francine Reynolds, artistic director, New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Miss.
Community Comes First
The deepest learning we carry forward: The community is “the thing.” Being in community to strive for honest, courageous dialogue and collaboration is bringing our ecology to a more healed and loving place of mutual care and resource sharing. Having to pause theatremaking during the harrowing first period of the pandemic offered the gift of being of service. We developed partnerships with our communities, and worked together for our mutual health and well-being first and foremost. This has made our theatremaking richer, with intensified authenticity that reflects the truths of our humanity during these times, which continue to be threatening for many.
The deepest learning we carry forward: The community is “the thing.” Being in community to strive for honest, courageous dialogue and collaboration is bringing our ecology to a more healed and loving place of mutual care and resource sharing. Having to pause theatremaking during the harrowing first period of the pandemic offered the gift of being of service. We developed partnerships with our communities, and worked together for our mutual health and well-being first and foremost. This has made our theatremaking richer, with intensified authenticity that reflects the truths of our humanity during these times, which continue to be threatening for many.
Building community relations and partnerships gives Perseverance Theatre the courage to bring forth our 44th season, with plays that exemplify what it means to be a change maker personally and socially. We examine what it means to take The Great Leap with Lauren Yee’s play, and with Kate Hamill’s Little Women here in Alaska, we will learn about our families, our communities, and our society, and bravely examine what came before and what we still need to challenge and change today. Where the Summit Meets The Stars by Frank Henry Kaash Katasse (Tlingit) challenges us to look deeply into ourselves to heal and break the cycles of trauma as our families grow. Katasse and his play affirm that Alaska Natives are tremendous leaders—a force for change as they revitalize their languages, culture, traditions, and ways of life. Our community’s Theatre In The Rough Company is producing Witch by Jen Silverman, and we are all anticipating this show, which will feature the tremendous talent here on Tlingit Aani!
Committing to support revitalization by producing the new work of Alaska Native playwrights with Alaska/Native/Indigenous casts and creative teams is why we are able to persevere. Alaska Natives are bringing us into the future with life-giving strategies to address the climate crisis and sustainability, and humbly and gratefully I share that we are better humans, theatremakers, and stewards for continuing to learn in right relations, in right purpose, and in collaborations with Alaska Native and Native/Indigenous leaders and artists and all of the communities Perseverance Theatre serves.
Of course, I am also figuring out my travel plans to see Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play on Broadway! This is such an important moment for Larissa and the U.S. theatre sector.
Amid the many pandemics, I cherish the resilience that comes from finding silver linings in community that strengthen our local and national ecologies, and weave and re-weave our safety nets for our collective thriveability.
Leslie Ishii, artistic director, Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska
Find the Missing Audience
When the Arkansas Rep announced their 2021-22 season, many of the locals I spoke with were happily surprised. The Rep, an institution with a traditional white audience base, was mounting a season that attempted inclusion. Because of my relationship with the Rep, I saw how much time and effort the staff put into making each production as sharp and creative as possible.
This season, I’m curious to see how the Rep approaches a production of Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s. A comedy that fosters conversations regarding the prison industrial complex, addiction, and homelessness creates ample opportunity for community outreach and marketing to diverse audiences. The simplicity of the setting and depth of character development gives actors ample space and opportunity to flourish. And Nottage’s casting directions allow for a diverse cast without the implementation of colorblind casting. With the production of Clyde’s I’m excited to see this: marketing in underserved communities that brings audiences from those communities into the theatre. When I saw the show (then titled Floyd’s) in development while at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, there was one thing missing: People in the audience who looked like the actors. I’m hoping the actors at the Rep can look out at numerous audience members who look like them.
Regarding shows I’d travel to see, there are two. (I’d also love to see them produced in Arkansas theatres.) 1. The Great Jheri Curl Debate by Inda Craig-Galván. Each time I walk into an Asian-owned store that sells Black beauty products, I say to myself, “There is a play here.” So I’m ecstatic that Craig-Galván has written it! 2. The Great Khan by Michael Gene Sullivan. This play centers a young Black boy/gamer. It’s surprising, soft, and funny. That combination is needed on so many stages.
As for other plays mounted in Arkansas that I’d like to see? I’m always curious about what TheatreSquared is up to. They have an exciting season. I’m especially eyeing Martyn Majok’s Sanctuary City.
Candrice Jones, former playwright-in-residence at Arkansas Repertory Theatre in Little Rock, Ark.
Excited and Scared
It has been thrilling to see theatres still willing to try new things in their programming choices, despite the uncertainties caused by the still-present pandemic. In Forward’s upcoming season the play that will stretch us the most is Feeding Beatrice: A Gothic Tale, by the brilliant Kirsten Greenidge. It will be the first piece we’ve done in the horror/suspense genre, and we are hoping audiences will embrace this piece, which feels like it builds on the foundations of seminal works such as A Raisin in the Sun and Beloved (with echoes of Get Out).
As for shows I want to see at other theatres in my state this season, thanks to the upcoming World Premiere Wisconsin Festival (WPW), my list is very, very long! Running from March to June 2023, WPW will feature full productions and staged readings of new plays at over 50 companies, all over the state. One that leaps out for me is Lloyd Suh’s The Heartsellers, which was commissioned by our colleagues at Milwaukee Rep. And if I get a chance to travel outside Wisconsin during this busy season, at the top of my list would be seeing author Katori Hall direct her play The Hot Wing King (a piece I fell head-over-heels for when I read it pre-pandemic) at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.
Jennifer Uphoff Gray, artistic director, Forward Theater Company in Madison, Wisc.
A Safe Space for All
I love the fact that Trinity Rep, the state theatre of Rhode Island, is taking even more steps to delve deeper into our mission of reinventing the public square with dramatic art that stimulates, educates, and engages our diverse community in a continuing dialogue. One example of this that really found its inception during the pandemic was a program I created called The Green Light Ghost Light Project, combining the “Greenlight a Vet” initiative, in which communities light a green light to show support for veterans, and our Ghostlight, to signal that the theatre is a safe space for all. In collaboration with our wonderful community partner, we have created a humanities course specifically for veterans called the Providence Clemente Veterans’ Initiative, in which our veterans tell their powerful stories on our stage and work intergenerationally with a now annual stage program called Veteran Voices.
I do want to give a shout-out to our upcoming production of The Inferior Sex by Jacqueline E. Lawton, directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo, as it will be a wonderful catalyst for conversation, especially as we think about legacy in an ever-changing world. Regionally, I definitely want to catch American Repertory Theatre’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, directed by Taibi Magar, and I am ecstatic to see August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson on Broadway this fall. I teach a class for our adult education program called “10 Weeks With August Wilson,” and hope to make this a field trip with some of my students, who are so excited to get back to live theatre!
Dr. Michelle Cruz, director of community engagement, Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I.
Second Chances
As a company that produces and develops new work, Passage is lucky to work on pieces whose themes are more recent and reflective of the time we are in. My hope is that as theatre artists, we are beginning to better embrace diversity on our stages and tell stories that reflect all American experiences. While our upcoming production of Blues in My Soul by David Robson is based on the true-life story of a blues guitarist from the 1950s, it highlights the racial tension still present in today’s arts scene and centers around a conversation that brings a white man and a Black man together to grapple with these difficult topics. It does not shy away from acknowledging the systemic oppression that guitarist Lonnie Johnson faced, but instead allows the audience to face the injustice and explore a better way forward. We are also developing and producing a new musical called Clean Slate with music by Kate Brennan, a book by David Lee White, and orchestrations by Josh Totora. This show highlights a diverse chorus of young people from various backgrounds and gender identities. It embraces the power of empathy and reminds us all that second chances can sometimes lead to tremendous healing.
C. Ryanne Domingues, artistic director, Passage Theatre in Trenton, N.J.
