Theater News

Playwrights Horizons 2016-17 Season to Include Five World Premieres

The season will open with the New York premiere of Julia Cho’s ”Aubergine”.

Tyrone Mitchell Henderson and Tim Kang in the world premiere of Julia Cho's Aubergine at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Tyrone Mitchell Henderson and Tim Kang in the world premiere of Julia Cho’s Aubergine at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
(© Kevin Berne)

Playwrights Horizons has announced the six new works that will make up its 2016-17 season, all but one of which are world premieres.

The season will kick off with the New York premiere of Julia Cho's Aubergine, directed by Kate Whoriskey. With previews beginning August 19, Aubergine is a lyrical play that explores how the making of a perfect meal is an expression more precise than language. Aubergine's world premiere is currently running at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Later in the season, Playwrights Horizons will present the world premiere of Obie Award winner Adam Bock's A Life (September 2016), directed by two-time Obie Award winner Anne Kauffman. In the play, Nate Martin is hopelessly single, and when his most recent breakup, another in a lifelong string of ill-fated matches, casts him into a funk, he turns to the only source of wisdom he trusts: the stars.

Daniel Aukin is set to direct Rancho Viejo (November 2016), a world premiere of a Playwrights Horizons commissioned new play by Dan LeFranc. The play follows the residents of Rancho Viejo, who drift from one gathering to the next, wrestling life's grandest themes while fending off existential despair – set against the lustful, yearning strains of a distant bolero.

The world premiere of Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen's The Light Years (February 2017) will be directed and developed by Obie Award winner Oliver Butler and made by the Debate Society. The new show is described as "an epic, intimate tale of two families struggling to meet their future, and a spectacular tribute to man’s indomitable spirit of invention."

No director has so far been announced for the world premiere of Zayd Dohrn's The Profane (March 2017), in which Raif Almedin, a first-generation immigrant who prides himself on his modern views, is forced to discover the threshold of his tolerance when his daughter falls for the son of a conservative Muslim family in White Plains.

The season's final offering will be Bella: An American Tale (May 2017), written by Obie Award winner Kirsten Childs and directed by two-time Obie Award winner Robert O’Hara. The co-world premiere, which will first be staged at Dallas Theatre Center this fall, is a Western musical adventure about a wanted woman of mythic proportions who looks to begin life anew out west.

Playwrights Horizons is a writer’s theater dedicated to the support and development of contemporary American playwrights, composers, and lyricists and to the production of their new work. Under the leadership of artistic director Tim Sanford and managing director Leslie Marcus, Playwrights Horizons aims to encourage the new work of veteran writers while nurturing an emerging generation of theater artists.