Clubbed Thumb Summerworks 2026 Review: Three Bold New Plays Take Big Swings

In a recent interview, Clubbed Thumb’s artistic director Maria Striar said, “We try to model not caring … that something gets good reviews” in the company’s annual Summerworks series. The “high-ambition, low-stakes” Summerworks structure crash-lands three very new plays in development in front of Clubbed Thumb’s eager audiences for fully staged, two-week runs. “There’s a little bit of, like, who cares? What’s really going to happen if this doesn’t work?”

And though none of the three plays in this season’s Summerworks series reach the giddy heights of Not Not Jane’s or Cold War Choir Practice, two delicious entries in 2025, maybe “Who cares?” is the right idea. Seeing a Summerworks show is always worthwhile: no other theater company treats its commissioned playwrights with such pride of place or irreverent reverence, entrusting freshly baked scripts to some of the best actors in town.

Titans

The Summerworks season kicked off with Jesse Jae Hoon’s tonally daring Titans: until its final harrowing third, it’s essentially an immigration farce. Hoon’s subtitle is “A City Symphony,” and the play aims to show an ethnically diverse community (nine actors play over 25 characters) roused to come together harmoniously to protect their neighbors in the face of ICE raids.

Leaping out most persuasively from the initial multilingual cacophony are Diana (Irene Sofia Lucio), a high school disciplinarian navigating the tension between upholding the rules and creating a genuinely safe environment for kids; Fran (Shannon Tyo), a hotel worker who melts down but then summons an activist’s strength after learning her adoptive parents never secured her citizenship; and, most compellingly, Joyce (Julia Brothers), a “tow truck lady” tasked with removing the vehicles of undocumented people taken by ICE without considering her own complicity.

For much of the play, Hoon handles all this serious stuff with an intense silliness that occasionally stretches beyond satire toward cartoon. Fran’s lawyer lists the documents she needs to show to finalize her naturalization in “just twelve short years”: “Professional references, papal commendation, Chris Pratt … yeah the person Chris Pratt.”

But while Hoon’s torrent of jokes land with uneven effect, Titans might better serve its subject matter by taking a lighter touch all the way through. A series of interstitial scenes with characters instructing the audience on their rights and the protocols for navigating ICE encounters feels particularly didactic without being dramatic, and Hoon pivots too quickly away from his comfort comedy zone into a more heavy-handed, heavy-hearted space. Good civics doesn’t always make for great theater.

Still, Tara Elliott’s clear, clever staging makes the fast-paced dialogue digestible, and, in this Summerworks series’ most striking design element, Brendan Aanes’s horrifying sound design for the sequences of ICE raids goes beyond the script to conjure the chilling understanding that our streets are no longer our own.

Derangements

Shockingly funny, Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s Derangements is very much the wackiest and most sturdy of the trio of plays on offer. Roxanne (Crystal Finn) confides in her friend Anne Marie (Hannah Cabell) over dinner that she has a problem: she’s realized that almost everyone she meets, especially her gynecologist, is sexually obsessed with her. Roxanne may be totally misreading every situation like a nymphomaniac Amelia Bedelia, but after a bizarre encounter with a flasher (Danny Wolohan), both friends begin to experience strange symptoms—aphasia, an immaculately conceived pregnancy, time travel-ish experiences beyond the 1983 setting—that make them question their sense of reality. “I don’t think you have dementia though I do think you might be evil,” a neurologist tells Anne Marie in one of the play’s paradigmatic exchanges.

That daffy conceit starts to go off the rails when Leonhard-Hooper drifts away from the women’s mutually judgy and incredulous rapport, but Annie Tippe’s quicksilver staging (which includes a high-speed snowmobile chase and an embodied re-enactment of the aggressive DuoLingo owl) keeps all of the play’s loopy detours within the same world. And Finn and Cabell are so breathtakingly funny together, Roxanne’s ditzy self-delusion clashing gloriously with Cabell’s skeptical put-togetherness, that the play’s incoherences seldom register as inadequacies.

Clubbed Thumb’s commission cycle focused on honoring Christopher Durang’s style initially sparked Leonhard-Hooper’s work on the play, and it might as well be called Durang-ments, so clearly is it a child of that lineage. Leonhard-Hooper nails the elegant vulgarity of Durang’s prurient treatment of the 1980s sexual mind as well as his characters’ cozy acceptance of impossible events nestled throughout the everyday. Amongst all the well-oiled ludicrousness, Derangements also has something sincere to say about loneliness, the way that it can infest an active imagination, and the salvific value of female friendship.

The Family Dog

In Bailey Williams’s The Family Dog, directed by Clubbed Thumb stalwart Tara Ahmadinejad (Grief Hotel), Winona (Sarah Steele) reluctantly comes home way too early for Christmas to say goodbye to Johnny (Bruce McKenzie), the elderly pet ready to cross the Rainbow Bridge. Instead, she finds her parents (Andrew Garman and Jennifer Van Dyck) resolute that Johnny’s not dying yet (the tumor is next to his stomach, not in it, they keep insisting). Less certain is how much life is left in each of Winona’s floundering siblings, including gambling addict Nickel (Ethan Dubin) squatting in the basement and Jillian (Talene Monahon), who’s just turned down her longtime boyfriend’s proposal.

Much of the family’s neurotically cruel bickering is played for laughs, but The Family Dog lacks the absurdist playfulness that made Williams’s Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, co-written with Emma Horwitz, such an unexpected delight. She’s on surest footing in imagining the queer siblings Winona and Fran (Brendan George) having a psychic conversation on a “homosexual wavelength,” as explained by Johnny the dog in one of his endearing patches of audience address.

That’s the kind of quirky side quest that Williams excels at. But The Family Dog has one paw pointed toward graceful weirdness and the other stuck in the realm of dysfunctional living room dramedies like Cult of Love: when the play is at its most structurally ordinary, the characters start to repeat themselves.

Ahmadinejad conjures up some rambunctious performances, but the laughs seem more often to generate from goofy line readings instead of from the text itself, which is pretty pessimistic about our capacity to make our squabbling, selfish families shape up before death comes for us all. In its current form, The Family Dog is ultimately a downer dressed up in jester’s clothes that don’t quite fit.