New Work Now!

NEw Work Now! is the popular reading series that allows audiences an opportunity to experience new work by a diverse selection of established and emerging theater artists.

This year’s 11 playwrights are Christina Anderson, Daniel Berrigan, Colman Domingo, Danai Gurira, Dawn Jamieson, Lisa Kron, Itamar Moses, Tanya Saracho, S.M. Shephard-Massat, Julian Sheppard, and Alena Smith.

Wednesday, September 7 at 7 PM
ZERO
By Julian Sheppard
Directed by Leigh Silverman
A lifelong New Yorker who’s lost his way. A desperate club owner. A Brazilian kept woman. An Israeli real estate broker. Two West Virginia teenagers. Beginning at Ground Zero with a tourist and a kind of tour guide, Zero explores how we live with a hole in the center of our world through a panoramic perspective on post-9/11 New York City. A play about the different routes we take to survival, what happens when disparate lives collide, and the desire for redemption.

Thursday, September 8 at 7 PM
THE VER**ZON PLAY
By Lisa Kron
Directed by Anne Kauffman
When Jenni called customer service all she wanted was to fix a minor problem with her cell phone bill. Instead she was sucked into a vortex of unimaginable horror. Now she wants revenge – or to get her cell phone service turned back on. This new play by Lisa Kron is part thriller, part screwball comedy, part based on actual events that have undoubtedly happened to YOU.

Friday, September 9 at 7 PM
THE BAD GUYS
By Alena Smith
Directed by Kip Fagan
It’s Indian summer and the boys are back home. Noah’s fired up the grill. Fink bought a steak. And Jesse, as always, has weed. They’re all set for a perfectly "bromantic" afternoon. But politics, ambition, money – and murder – have a way of killing the buzz. By the end of the day, even the strongest bonds will be shaken in this collision of angry young men.

Saturday, September 10 at 7 PM
HOLLOW ROOTS
By Christina Anderson
Directed by Eric Ting
They say we live in post-racial times but who leads a post-racial life? In this thought-provoking play for one actor, a young Black American woman sets out on a quest to find one person leading a life unrestricted by race or gender.

Monday, September 12 at 7 PM
THE CONVERT
By Danai Gurira
Directed by Emily Mann
Set amid the scramble for sovereignty in southern Africa (now Zimbabwe) in 1895, The Convert tells the tale of a young girl who escapes a forced marriage with the help of a stalwart black African catechist. Indebted to this new Christian god, she shuns her culture to become his protégé, but when an anti-colonial uprising erupts she must decide where her heart truly belongs. This searing new play about an explosive clash of cultures is by the co-author of In the Continuum who also appeared in this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Measure for Measure. The Convert was commissioned by Center Theater Group and will receive its world premiere this season in a co-production between McCarter Theatre Center (Princeton, NJ), Goodman Theatre (Chicago, IL), and Center Theater Group (Los Angeles, CA).

Tuesday, September 13 at 7 PM
New Work Then: THE TRIAL OF THE CATONSVILLE NINE
By Daniel Berrigan, text prepared by Saul Levitt
Directed by Gordon Davidson
On May 17, 1968, Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother Father Philip Berrigan and seven other Catholic peace activists seized 378 draft documents from Local Board No. 33 in Catonsville, Maryland and publicly burned them to protest the napalming of innocent people during the Vietnam War. Drawing on court transcripts, this play is an account of their trial. The Public remembers the nine’s courageous actions and this vital American play via a New Work Then presentation, helmed by the director of the original 1971 production.

Wednesday, September 14 at 7 PM
MALA HIERBA
By Tanya Saracho
Directed by Jerry Ruiz
Set in the South Texas of her youth and written in the Windy City, where Chicago Magazine called her Best New Playwright of 2010, Tanya Saracho’s Mala Hierba focuses on the trophy wife of a border magnate who wavers between her wifely duty and the love of her life as she navigates the dangerous waters between desire and obligation.

Thursday, September 15 at 7 PM
YELLOWJACKETS
By Itamar Moses
Politics. Race. Class. Welcome to Berkeley High School, 1994: the most diverse public high school in America…and as divided as America itself. But when an on-campus brawl sets in motion a chain of events that effects newspaper nerds and gang members alike, loyalties will be tested, identities questioned, and a community that prides itself on always being ahead of the political curve will be forced to face how far it still has to go. And then there’s P.E.

Friday, September 16 at 7 PM
STARVING
By S.M. Shephard-Massat
Directed by Delroy Lindo
World War II is over, and Bettie and Meeker have moved from rural Florida to urban Atlanta to join a small but up-and-coming black community. But as pressure mounts at Meeker’s workplace and Bettie’s expectations become bigger than both of them, the better life they dreamed of seems less than certain to be on the horizon.

Saturday, September 17 at 7 PM
WILD WITH HAPPY
By Colman Domingo
Directed by Robert O’Hara
Colman Domingo, star of Passing Strange and The Scottsboro Boys, explores the surreal, bizarre and outrageous comedy that can stem from loss via the story of Gil: a young man who plans to scatter his mother’s ashes in the place where she was most happy, Disney World.

Sunday, September 18 at 7 PM
MANGLED BEAMS
By Dawn Jamieson (Cayuga/Iroquois)
Directed by James Fall Shubinski (Mohican)
Iroquois ironworkers built New York’s skyscrapers and on 9/11 many returned to the World Trade Center to remove the mangled beams raised up by those who came before them. In this new play by Dawn Jamieson, these Native men seek rescue and redemption as they try to untangle the beams and their own lives, as well.