John J. Caswell, Jr., Shayok Misha Chowdhury and More Set for Playwrights Horizons Spring '26 Lineup

Playwrights Horizons has revealed its Spring 2026 programming. The season both brings Playwrights into collaboration with artists whose work it hasn’t yet presented—Nazareth Hassan and Jen Tullock and Frank Winters in Fall, Jacob Perkins in Spring—while emphasizing the importance of continued support for artists across their careers in works from John J. Caswell, Jr., Milo Cramer, and Shayok Misha Chowdhury.
 
Playwrights Horizons’ previously announced Fall 2025 productions, Nazareth Hassan’s Practice and Jen Tullock & Frank Winters’ Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God, both incisively consider how community and collaboration gone awry can smother individuality and heterodoxy; Spring 2026 offers breathtaking narratives of healing through togetherness. John J. Caswell, Jr. makes his return to Playwrights after Wet Brain, a “horror show, unequivocally…[but also] a very funny, pitch-black comedy about addiction and obligation, love and abandonment” (The New York Times, Critic’s Pick review). Love and loss fuels Jerome, another hauntedly intimate play by Caswell, Jr.—as the playwright brings a wealth of heart and candor to the story of an aging gay couple in an Arizona mountainside ghost town in the early 1990s, reshaping their relationship around a third: a visitor from New York, itself becoming a ghost town. The production reteams Caswell, Jr. with director Dustin Wills, who in Wet Brain displayed his keen interpretation of the Caswell’s characters’ confined worlds undergirded by seismic, unknowable forces.
 
Jacob Perkins’ The Dinosaurs similarly taps into the cosmic in the everyday, in the dynamics of a women’s recovery group that meets weekly, and perhaps eternally. Les Waters, who directed Lucas Hnath’s The Thin Place at Playwrights Horizons with “thrilling austerity” (The New York Times, Critic’s Pick review), likewise takes an evocatively spare and performance-forward approach to this powerful meditation on healing that occurs among others. As in Jerome, characters confronting feelings of longing and obsolescence unite through overlapping desires, while revealing the diverging ways we express them. The Dinosaurs has been selected to inaugurate Playwrights Horizons' new “Unplugged” programming model.
 
Milo Cramer debuts their off-kilter, On the Town-meets-Waiting for Godot musical No Singing in the Navy, following three soldiers on leave, spending 24 hours in New York before they’re sent away to their certain deaths. No Singing in the Navy probes classic American musical tropes in its strange, funny, and tonally slippery interrogation of America’s self-image. Playwrights Horizons continues their relationship with Cramer following School Pictures, in which the writer and performer crafted witty, bracingly honest portraits—of students in a competitive, grossly unequal system—through childlike songs. No Singing in the Navy is another example of Cramer’s sly mastery of dissonance, finding wells of meaning in the distance between lighthearted melody, silliness, and ideas of vast, tangled complexity. 
 
Playwrights will also collaborate once again with Pulitzer Prize finalist playwright and director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, one season after his direction of Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot (currently running). Following his universally acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize finalist, bilingual in Bangla and English work Public Obscenities, Chowdhury premiered Rheology at The Bushwick Starr, and Playwrights brings the The Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, and Ma-Yi Theater Company production Off Broadway as part of its Redux Series, joining forces with kindred theater companies to remount their productions on our stage for a second life. Rheology, likewise in Bangla and English, stars Chowdhury and his mother, theoretical physicist Bulbul Chakraborty, as the two stage the latter’s death nightly, in preparation for eventual, inevitable grief. Despite death as its framework, the piece is a “delight, with a lively structure that’s a mishmash of scientific lectures, traditionally staged scenes and meditations on how the two have grown closer by seeing each other passionately pursue their work” (The New York Times). As Exeunt wrote, “a substantial portion of it would stand on its own as a captivating physics lecture…[but] the beating heart of Rheology is less its intellectual rigor than its tenderness—a tender love between mother and son; a tender pride and respect in each for the other’s passionate work; a tender joy in getting to work together–and the way it uses the language of both theater and science to express this love.”
 
The previously-announced Fall 2025 portion of the 2025-26 season includes the world premieres of two shape-shifting works: Nazareth Hassan’s (recently at Vineyard Theatre: Bowl EP) dark psycho-comedy Practice (October-December 2025), directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, and Jen Tullock’s and Frank Winters’s captivating solo performance Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God, performed by Tullock and directed by Jared Mezzocchi (October 2025).
 
The deviously funny and disquieting Practice depicts an ensemble of actors entering an unconventional devised theater process led by a maverick “genius.” Hassan’s twisting and twisted script explores power and submission through the act of artistic collaboration within a suffocatingly tight group. While Hassan deconstructs the psychology of the ensemble, Jen Tullock (Severance) constructs an ensemble performance through just her own body and voice. In Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God, Tullock enacts the entire narrative of a queer memoirist revisiting the ultra-religious hometown and upbringing from which she was exiled—and the ensemble of characters that compose it. Audiences who know Tullock from her devoted sisterly turn as Devon on Severance have never seen her quite like this…or this…or this…—glitching between a caped Polish 10-year-old; an overbearing literary agent; a young religious leader; the protagonist’s mother, described as resembling “Mary Kay Place in a full face of drugstore makeup”; and many others.
 
This season, Playwrights Horizons also teams with London’s Soho Theatre to launch a festival celebrating the power of perspectives from abroad. The Foreign Exchange Festival, December 2025 at both Playwrights and Soho Theatre, sends four new works from U.K. playwrights to New York and four from U.S. writers to London for readings.