Theatre for a New Audience Announces 2024-25 Season

Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA), led by founding artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz, has announced its 2024-25 season, which includes American and world premieres of plays by Ethan Lipton, Wole Soyinka, and Taylor Mac. It will also present works by William Shakespeare. All performances take place at TFANA’s home at Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.

TFANA’s 2024-25 season kicks off with the world premiere of a new musical, We Are Your Robots, running from November 10–December 8. Featuring a book and lyrics by Obie winner Ethan Lipton and music composed and performed by Lipton, Vito Dieterle, Eben Levy, and Ian Riggs, We Are Your Robots reunites Lipton with two-time Tony-nominated director Leigh Silverman. Lipton and Silverman’s previous collaborations include Tumacho, The Outer Space, and No Place to Go. In We Are Your Robots, Ethan Lipton and his orchestra take on the roles of four robots exploring the relationship between humans and our machines.

Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts i and ii become a single play in actor Dakin Matthews’s (Waitress, Gilmore Girls) adaptation,  running from January 26–March 2. The award-winning adaptation was last produced at Lincoln Center in 2003. Eric Tucker, artistic director of Bedlam Theatre Company, directs.

Awoye Timpo returns to TFANA after winning an Obie Award for her staging of Alice Childress’s Wedding Band, to direct the American premiere of The Swamp Dwellers, the 1958 drama by playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist Wole Soyinka, who in 1986 became the first African recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature. This tragic tale steeped in Yoruba myth and lore, set in a rustic hut in the Niger Delta, runs from March 30–April 20.

The season ends with the world premiere of Taylor Mac’s Prosperous Fools, running from June 1–June 29. The MacArthur “genius” and Pulitzer Prize finalist writes and stars in this contemporary comedy of manners inspired by Moliere’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.

In addition, TFANA’s production of Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice, directed by Arin Arbus, starring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock, and first presented at Polonsky Shakespeare Center in 2022, will tour to Scotland from January 18-February 15. John Douglas Thompson will be the first Black American actor in theater history to play Shylock in Edinburgh in a full production at a major theater. The tour continues the Shakespeare Exchange, the transatlantic partnership between TFANA and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh.