Theater News

Soho Rep Announces The Hunger Cycle, a Series of Three World Premieres

The cycle will begin with The Potluck, a new musical by César Alvarez.

Linda Buchwald

Linda Buchwald

| Off-Broadway |

March 9, 2026

César Alvarez
César Alvarez
(© David Gordon)

Soho Rep, with signal producing support from the Civis Foundation, announced The Hunger Cycle, a series of three world premiere productions over the next three seasons. The works ask the question, “What are we hungry for?” and explore material, emotional, and moral forms of sustenance in contemporary life.

The Hunger Cycle will begin with the world premiere of The Potluck by César Alvarez, directed by Obie winner Sarah Benson and co-produced with INTAR Theatre. The musical, Soho Rep’s final production of the 2025-26 season, features a 12-person intergenerational cast. In 1979, five labor organizers were murdered at a protest in the streets of Greensboro, NC, by members of the KKK and the American Nazi Party. A year later, César James Alvarez was born into the survivor community and named for two of the victims. Thirty-seven years after that, Alvarez got a commission to write a musical about the Greensboro Massacre. The production is supported by the Miranda Family Fund.

The next show in the series, premiering in the 2026-27 season, is the world premiere of Feast for the Dead, playwright Madeline Easley’s off-Broadway debut. Feast for the Dead, which received a Venturous Playwright Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center in St. Paul, features a nine-person cast and explores responsibility to the deceased, resilience in the living, and cycles of destruction and rebirth into the unexpected vessel of a zombie apocalypse.

The cycle will close with  Radical Evolution’s Hunger, which will invite audiences into a fable that challenges us to interrogate physical, spiritual, and communal hunger and how these feelings remind us to (re)connect with each other and the natural world as a means of healing ourselves and the planet. Through the piece, we follow Red as they seek satisfaction, belonging, and connection with the world around them and asks audiences to find (one of) themselves, while sharing food, stories, and songs with one another.

Additional details about each production will be announced in due course.

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