2021-2022 Season

Poor Clare  

World Premiere
by Chiara Atik
directed by Alana Dietze

Previews: October 20th-22nd; Opens: October 23rd, Closes: November 29th

Clare is just a regular noblewoman living in medieval Italy, trying out hairstyles and waiting to get married. Until a man named Francis starts ranting in the courtyard. Based on the real story of St Clare of Assisi, Poor Clare is a play about what happens when your eyes are opened to the injustice of the world around you, and you can’t look away..

Chiara Atik’s plays include Five Times in One Night, BUMP, Poor Clare, and WOMEN, a mashup of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and HBO’s “Girls.” Her work has been developed at New York Theater Workshop, Clubbed Thumb/Playwrights Horizons Superlab, Williamstown, Northern Stage, and Colt Coeur. Chiara’s writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Glamour Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and NYMag.com. Other writing credits include “Paris is Lovely/Lonely When You’re Alone” (Amazon Kindle) and “Modern Dating: A Field Guide,” (Harlequin, 2013). Her feature film script, Fairy Godmother, was on the 2016 Black List. Chiara is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theater and an alum of EST’s Youngblood.

ASCENSION 

World Premiere
by D.G. Watson
directed by Ahmed Best

Previews- October 5th; Opens: October 6th; 

A live theater/online hybrid, an interactive, sci-fi mystery-thriller that strikes at the heart of our assumptions about faith, memory and reality. Rebel suffers from amnesia. She’s trapped inside a long, narrow box. Nobody knows she’s in there… nobody but you. For some strange reason, your mind and her mind are psychically linked, and only you can help her escape.

D.G. Watson is the author of THE TRAGEDY: A COMEDY (Ammunition Theatre Company), UNBOUND, (IAMA Theatre Company), SNAP (2005 NYC Battle of the Bards Winner), PRIME TIME (Real TheatreWorks and PSNBC, Abingdon Theater), REMEMBER THE LIGHT RAIL (Ammunition Theatre Company and IAMA Theatre Company) and the collaborative piece GAME ON (Actors Theatre of Louisville). Watson was a co-creator and writer for the Emmy-nominated Disney series “Johnny and the Sprites.” His past exploits include an attempted walk across the United States in the name of world peace, which was featured on NPR’s “This American Life.”

HOODED OR BEING BLACK FOR DUMMIES

Los Angeles Premiere
by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm
directed by Ahmed Best

Previews- March 9,10,11; Opens- March 12th; Closes- April 18th

Marquis and Tru are both fourteen year old black boys, but they exist in two totally different worlds. Marquis is a book smart prep-schooler living in the affluent suburb of Achievement Heights; while Tru is a street savvy kid from deep within the inner city of Baltimore. Their worlds overlap one day in a holding cell. Tru decides that Marquis has lost his “blackness” and pens a how-to manual entitled “Being Black for Dummies”. He assumes the role of professor, but Marquis proves to be a reluctant pupil. They butt heads, debate, wrestle and ultimately prove that Nietzsche and 2pac were basically saying the same thing.

Tearrance most recently presented his new play Black Dick at the 2019 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. He won a Helen Hayes award (the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding Original New Play or Musical) for his play Hooded: Or Being Black for Dummies, which premiered and was revived at Mosaic Theater.

Tearrance holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Catholic University of America. He is a recent graduate from the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Julliard, and is a former Sundance Institute and Time Warner Foundation Fellow, and 2050 Fellow at New York Theater Workshop.

Tearrance is currently a staff writer for the second season of Boomerang. His first pilot, sci-fi dramedy Demascus, is in development with Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Productions, and he is adapting the book Street God as a TV series for Anonymous Content.

“Hooded, Or Being Black for Dummies is … an awakening. A series of ‘Aha’ moments and… a well-deserved smack in the face.” – DC Metro

CONTINUITY

West Coast Premiere
Written by Bess Wohl
Directed by Lindsay Allbaugh

Previews- July 13, 14, 15; Opens- July 16th; Closes- August 22nd  

A sheet of ice sits in the desert of New Mexico. A mad eco-terrorist plants a bomb in order to save humankind. A beleaguered film crew tries to get in one last shot before losing the light. In Continuity, storytelling and science collide with hilarious and devastating consequences. The play asks, “How do we keep going when hope can seem as fictional as a Hollywood ending?” and also, “What’s for lunch?”

Bess Wohl’s plays include GRAND HORIZONS (getting its Broadway debut in December 2019 at Second Stage), SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS (John Gassner Outer Critics Circle Award, top ten lists in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Guardian and others), MAKE BELIEVE, AMERICAN HERO, and the musical PRETTY FILTHY with composer/lyricist Michael Friedman and The Civilians (Lucille Lortel and Drama Desk nominations for Outstanding Musical). Her play, CONTINUITY, had its world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in the spring of 2019.

Her plays have been produced or developed at theaters in New York and around the country. Awards and honors include the Athena Award for her screenplay, VIRGINIA, a MacDowell Fellowship, and inclusion on Hollywood’s Black List of Best Screenplays. She also writes screenplays and has developed multiple original television projects for HBO, ABC, USA, FOX, Disney, Paramount and others. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Yale School of Drama.

“Wohl isn’t afraid to let the ridiculous rub up against the sublime…as entertaining as it is transcendent” -Time Out (New York)