Geffen Playhouse Reveals 2026/2027 Season - PURPOSE, WINE IN THE WILDERNESS and More

Geffen Playhouse has unveiled five productions that will make up its 2026/2027 season lineup from Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney. The 2026/2027 season will launch November 11, 2026, and continue through July 4, 2027. The lineup will feature a mix of world, West Coast and Los Angeles premieres.

The 2026/2027 Geffen Playhouse season will launch in its Gil Cates Theater with the Los Angeles premiere of the Tony Award–winning (Best Play, 2025) Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Purpose, directed by Phylicia Rashad and featuring the original Broadway cast. Both intimate and epic, Purpose is provocative, often hilarious and ultimately a devastating exploration of legacy and the cost of believing in something bigger than yourself.

The season will continue with the West Coast premiere of Bess Wohl’s Liberation, following its smash Broadway run. Liberation is a daring and sharply funny new play that explores what it truly means to claim power, both on your own and together and reminds us that revolution is never simple, but always worth the fight. Liberation is a multi-theater co-production with additional venues to be announced.

The next production in the season lineup will take place in the intimate Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater with the Los Angeles premiere of Ngozi Anyanwu’s The Monsters. Told with raw honesty and lyrical intensity, The Monsters explores the complicated intimacy of sibling relationships when family can be both a sanctuary and a battlefield. This sibling love story examines the ways we protect one another, even when bruises stay hidden just under the surface.

Since first joining Geffen Playhouse as its artistic director in 2023, McCraney has spearheaded a bold new vision for the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, establishing it as a lab for artistic ingenuity—a dedicated space for creative experimentation and the development of new works, including workshops, readings and cross‑disciplinary collaborations. This work has been ongoing, bringing spirited commissions, diverse voices and dynamic artists into The Geffen Playhouse fold. The initiative has been reflected on our stages in seasons past, resonates in the 2026/2027 season and will continue to drive ambitious, innovative artistic risk‑taking in the years ahead. Several initiatives are on the immediate horizon, from public-facing workshops for plays in active development to projects under consideration for special limited engagements.

Following The Monsters in the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, the season will pick up in the Gil Cates Theater with the world premiere of Grace McLeod’s new farce Closing Costs. Housing prices in LA are already criminal, but in this home, they may actually be fatal. Closing Costs is a whip-smart send-up of the absurdity of trying to buy a home in Los Angeles, where the market is cutthroat, the wiring is questionable and everyone is just one inspection away from disaster.

The Geffen Playhouse 2026/2027 season will conclude with Alice Childress’ Wine in the Wilderness, directed by LaChanze. With incisive humor and unflinching honesty, Wine in the Wilderness interrogates class, colorism, gender and the politics of representation, asking who gets to define beauty, respectability and worth. It is a story that feels as urgent today as when it was first written.

GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE 2026/2027 SEASON LINEUP

The Broadway/Steppenwolf Theatre Company Production of

Purpose (Gil Cates Theater)

LOS ANGELES PREMIERE
November 11 – December 13, 2026
Written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Directed by Phylicia Rashad

Featuring Alana Arenas, Glenn Davis, Jon Michael Hill, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix & Kara Young.

Meet the Jaspers: generations of a powerful Black political family under one roof where nothing stays buried for long. When their youngest son returns home, instincts kick in to protect their public image of leadership and moral authority, and fractures soon appear as private grievances, betrayals, and long-simmering questions of identity rise to the surface.

Direct from Broadway, this 2025 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning play makes its LA debut with the original Broadway cast, directed by the incomparable Phylicia Rashad. Both intimate and epic, Purpose is provocative, often hilarious, and ultimately a devastating exploration of legacy and the cost of believing in something bigger than yourself.

Liberation (Gil Cates Theater)

WEST COAST PREMIERE
January 27 – February 28, 2027
Written by Bess Wohl
Directed by Whitney White

Following its smash Broadway run, Liberation makes its West Coast debut with sharp wit, emotional insight, and fearless ambition to challenge the status quo. It’s 1970, somewhere in Ohio: six women gather in a basement gymnasium for a consciousness raising group, determined to shake up their lives and change the world. These meetings quickly become complicated—friendships are tested, alliances shift, the personal becomes political and vice versa, ultimately calling into question the very meaning of freedom itself.

Directed by Tony Award nominee Whitney White, this daring and sharply funny new play explores what it truly means to claim power, both on your own and together, and reminds us that revolution is never simple, but always worth the fight.

The Monsters (Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater)

LOS ANGELES PREMIERE
March 3 – April 4, 2027
Written by Ngozi Anyanwu
Directed by Awoye Timpo
Featuring Ngozi Anyanwu
Additional casting to be announced

As a seasoned MMA fighter at the end of his career, Big reluctantly agrees to coach his younger sister, Lil, a fierce and hungry newcomer with something to prove. But years of distance, resentment, and unresolved pain simmer beneath every training session. Does Big have what it takes to make Lil a champion… or will their past knock them both out?

Told with raw honesty and lyrical intensity, The Monsters explores the complicated intimacy of sibling relationships when family can be both a sanctuary and a battlefield. With sharp dialogue and moments of surprising tenderness, this sibling love story examines the ways we protect one another, even when bruises stay hidden just under the surface.

Closing Costs (Gil Cates Theater)

WORLD PREMIERE
March 31 – May 2, 2027
Written by Grace McLeod
Directed by Hannah Wolf
Produced in Association with IAMA Theatre Company

Housing prices in LA are already criminal, but in this home, they may actually be fatal. A scrappy real estate agent and her Uber-driving boyfriend are secretly living in the “luxury” property she’s desperate to sell: a disastrously flipped fever dream where corners are cut and nothing works the way it should. When the home’s bro developer shows up, things go from unethical to unhinged.

A newly successful gay couple and a pregnant lesbian couple spiral into a bidding war over the supposedly hot property as the agent and her boyfriend scramble to keep the sale alive—and the skeletons in the closet—in a perfectly escalating farce. Closing Costs is a whip-smart send-up of the absurdity of trying to buy a home in Los Angeles, where the market is cutthroat, the wiring is questionable, and everyone is just one inspection away from disaster.

Wine in the Wilderness (Gil Cates Theater)

June 2 – July 4, 2027
Written by Alice Childress
Directed by LaChanze
Produced in Association with LaChanze Productions

Set during the height of the 1964 Harlem riot, Wine in the Wilderness unfolds in the apartment of Bill Jameson, a painter determined to capture “the essence” of Black womanhood in his latest triptych. As friends take shelter from the rising tensions outside, the arrival of a young woman disrupts Bill’s carefully constructed vision and exposes the assumptions, judgments, and hierarchies shaping both his art and his community.