New York Theater Workshop Announces New Creative Director’s First Season

For New York Theater Workshop’s first season programmed after the departure of its longtime creative director, the Off Broadway fixture plans to supply an intergenerational saga centered on a Black household in Illinois, a lesbian farce set on a naval base, a narrative a couple of mysterious album of Nazi-era pictures, and a play with an uncommon star: a Microsoft text-to-speech device.

The slate of exhibits, introduced on Friday, has been curated by Patricia McGregor, who changed James C. Nicola as creative director final 12 months. The group has a monitor document of manufacturing influential work, together with its largest hit, “Rent,” in addition to celebrated productions corresponding to “Hadestown,” “Once,” “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.”

The 2023-24 season contains three world premieres and one work that debuted last year, favoring contemporary over recognizable work. (The most up-to-date season featured the Broadway-bound “Merrily We Roll Along,” starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez.) McGregor mentioned that whereas there may be definitely a spot for these sorts of entrenched works at New York Theater Workshop, her inaugural season is targeted on embracing threat and supporting artists whose work may very well be misplaced if the theater world turns into overly targeted on identify recognition, trusted types and making an attempt to make sure industrial success.

“We’re extra of a laboratory than a manufacturing facility,” McGregor mentioned. “Part of what the workshop desires to be is a testing floor.”

This fall, McGregor will direct “The Refuge Plays” by Nathan Alan Davis, whose play “Nat Turner in Jerusalem” was staged at New York Theater Workshop in 2016. Produced with and staged at Roundabout Theater Company, the work is about 4 generations of a Black household who dwell in a house that they constructed themselves in a forest. An earlier model of the manufacturing was scheduled to start out rehearsing in 2020 and was delayed by the pandemic.

Later within the 12 months, the nonprofit will stage “Merry Me,” a brand new work by the South Korean playwright and director Hansol Jung (“Wolf Play”). In “Merry Me,” which might be directed by Leigh Silverman (who directed final 12 months’s voting-rights musical “Suffs”), a stressed lieutenant seeks to pleasure different girls on the bottom — together with the final’s spouse — throughout a blackout.

“I really like you a lot I might die,” slated for winter 2024 and directed by Lucas Hnath, employs a Microsoft text-to-speech product for the monologues, in between songs carried out by the playwright, Mona Pirnot. (The Microsoft-fueled actor is humorous and unusual, McGregor mentioned, but it surely additionally comes off as surprisingly human.)

Next spring, the corporate will produce Tectonic Theater Project’s “Here There Are Blueberries,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich a couple of assortment of Nazi-era pictures that’s delivered to the desk of an archivist on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, making the information and setting a German businessman out on a journey of discovery about his household. Kaufman, who was behind “The Laramie Project,” can even direct the play, which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in California and is at the moment onstage on the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C.