Michael Shannon & Paul Sparks Led WAITING FOR GODOT & More Set for TFANA 2023-24 Season

Theatre for a New Audience has revealed its 2023-24 season of Shakespeare alongside classic and contemporary authors: British artist Zinnie Harris explores Lady Macbeth in the American Premiere of her new play, Macbeth (an undoing), written and directed by Ms. Harris after Shakespeare in a production from the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, presented by TFANA in association with Rose Theatre, London; Annie Dorsen investigates Aeschylus and AI; Arin Arbus stages Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; and Shayok Misha Chowdhury directs the remarkable Soho Rep and NAATCO National Partnership Project production of his Public Obscenities, co-presented by TFANA and Woolly Mammoth Theater Company. 

TFANA’s 44th season begins with the Off-Broadway Premiere of Annie Dorsen’s “wry, funny, and probing” (Nicole Serratore, Exeunt) Prometheus Firebringer. This event will be a hybrid performance/lecture, which continues Ms. Dorsen’s genre of algorithmic theatre using a predictive text model to fill in missing elements of Aeschylus’ Prometheia trilogy. The New York Premiere of Prometheus Firebringer was May 11-13, 2023, Off-Off Broadway at The Chocolate Factory Theater, co-presented and co-produced with Media Art Xploration and New York Live Arts. The world premiere was Jan 26-28, 2023, at Bryn Mawr College, produced with major support by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia. 

The second production in TFANA’s 2023-24 season will be Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, staged by Arin Arbus and featuring Michael Shannon (TFANA’s Denis Johnson’s Des Moines and Ionesco’s The Killer) as Estragon; Paul Sparks (The Killer) as Vladimir; Jeffrey Biehl as Lucky; and Ajay Naidu as Pozzo. Ms. Arbus, who has staged Shakespeare, Wilder, Ibsen and Strindberg, and Denis Johnson with TFANA, stages Beckett for the first time (The production, originally slated for spring 2020 was postponed due to the pandemic.). 

Following Waiting for Godot, TFANA and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company present the Soho Rep and NAATCO National Partnership Project’s production of Public Obscenities, a bilingual play written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhuryand performed in Bangla and English. Public Obscenities will play at Woolly Mammoth November – December 2023 and at TFANA January – February 2024.

In its world premiere at Soho Rep in Spring 2023, Helen Shaw of The New Yorker praised Public Obscenities as “delicate, wise, incredibly rich,” and The New York Times, in a Critic’s Pick review by Juan A. Ramírez, praised the “expansive production” for leaving the audience “longing for even more” with its “uniformly excellent cast and deliberate pacing of a confident playwright.” The production has won numerous accolades, including the Ensemble Award at the 2023 Drama Desk Awards.

TFANA previously presented Soho Rep’s world premiere productions of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ OBIE Award-winning An Octoroon and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Fairview.

The final production will be TFANA in association with Rose Theatre, London presenting of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh production of Zinnie Harris’ reexamination of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Written and Directed by Ms. Harris, Macbeth (an undoing) had its world premiere in February 2023 at the Royal Lyceum, which also commissioned the play. The Guardian praised the production as an “audacious conjuring.” The all-U.K. company will play at TFANA in the U.S. Premiere, April 2024.

In the winter of 2025, TFANA’s staging of The Merchant of Venice, starring John Douglas Thompson and directed by Arin Arbus, will play at the Royal Lyceum.

The Merchant of Venice brought Arbus and Thompson, who plays Shylock, together for their fifth classical collaboration. Reviewing the production, The New York Times deemed Thompson “perhaps the greatest Shakespeare interpreter in contemporary American theater” and “a virtuoso of psychological insight and emotional specificity, [who] makes each centuries-old line sound like it has occurred to him in the moment.” The production’s world premiere was in 2022 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center in a co-production between TFANA and Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC).

Jeffrey Horowitz says, “Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is thrilled to play at the Royal Lyceum and work again with David Greig, artistic director. David is a celebrated author whom TFANA commissioned to create a new version of Strindberg’s The Father, which TFANA produced in 2016, starring John Douglas Thompson and directed by Arin Arbus. Though TFANA has toured two Shakespeare productions to the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon—in 2001 and 2007—this will be TFANA’s Edinburgh debut.” 

Horowitz adds, “Many brilliant actors have played Shylock, beginning with Richard Burbage in the original production in the 1590s. Most have been white men. In 1824, Ira Aldridge, the first great American Shakespearean, left New York City for Britain due to racial discrimination. Aldridge is rightly celebrated for his Othello, the first by a Black actor (though he could not play the role in America, only in Britain and Europe). In 1831, Aldridge became the first Black actor to play Shylock in the United Kingdom. Aldridge premiered his Shylock in Hull and played it in Edinburgh. John Douglas Thompson will be the first Black American actor to play Shylock in Edinburgh in nearly 200 years.

In the 2023-24 season, TFANA continues Bianca Vivion: Reflections, a free series of post-performance conversations with guests from the worlds of the arts and activism, lensing the work on our stage through the political and cultural questions that matter to a rising generation of New Yorkers. Vivion’s relationship with TFANA dates back to 2018, when she was 21 and still a Columbia undergraduate. She had just published an opinion piece, “Representation Is More Than Skin Color,” under the byline Bianca Vivion Brooks, in The New York Times, examining the possibilities and limits of representation in art and culture. Each of this season’s offerings will feature one free Reflections event. 

2023-24 Season Programming

Prometheus Firebringer

Event

Hybrid Performance/Lecture

Written, Directed, Performed by

Annie Dorsen

After Aeschylus

September 15 – October 1, 2023 

Off Broadway Premiere

“What shall I do?” is a question at the heart of every Greek tragedy, observes philosopher Simon Critchley. When there are no good options, when every course of action comes with unbearable costs, how do you choose? This question inspires a new lecture-performance by Annie Dorsen, Prometheus Firebringer, which continues her exploration of the ambiguous impacts of technology.

In ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus stole the gods’ fire to give it to humans—sparking sudden and dramatic advances in technology and the arts, and dramatic new sources of conflict. His story is told in the 2,500-year-old Prometheia trilogy attributed to Aeschylus, of which only Prometheus Bound remains in full.

In Prometheus Firebringer, Dorsen uses the predictive text model GPT-3 to generate speculative versions of the missing story. Each night a chorus of AI-generated Greek masks performs a different iteration, while Dorsen engages the audience in reflections on power, knowledge, and doubt.

For the past decade Dorsen has been making work about how our reliance on computational tools and systems is changing our relationship to language, power, and thought—what we know and how we know it.

Three Free Post Performance Conversations with Ms. Dorsen and Guests (to be announced) will be offered on weekends. Details to follow.   

Annie Dorsen is a theatre director and writer whose works explore the intersection of algorithms and live performance. Her most recent project, Infinite Sun (2019), is an algorithmic sound installation commissioned by the Sharjah Biennial 14. Previous performance projects, including The Slow Room (2018), The Great Outdoors (2017), Yesterday Tomorrow (2015), A Piece of Work (2013), Spokaoke (2012), and Hello Hi There (2010), have been widely presented in the US and internationally.

Her work has been presented at Performance Space New York (formerly PS122), Le Festival d'Automne de Paris, The Holland Festival, BAM's Next Wave Festival, New York Live Arts, Kampnagel Summer Festival, Kaaitheater, and The New York Film Festival's “Views from the Avant-garde” series, along with many others. 

She is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, which she also directed.

A retrospective of Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic work was presented in 2022 at Bryn Mawr College with major support by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. The publication Algorithmic Theater: Essays and Dialogues, 2012-2022 was created as a literary companion to the event, collecting a decade of writings by and about Dorsen, including dialogues with artistic collaborators in addition to provocative essays on theatre and technology.

In addition to awards for Passing Strange, Dorsen received a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2014 Herb Alpert Award for the Arts in Theatre.

Waiting for Godot

By Samuel Beckett

Featuring Michael Shannon as Estragon and Paul Sparks as Vladimir

and

Jeffrey Biehl as Lucky and Ajay Naidu as Pozzo  

Directed by Arin Arbus

November 4 – December 3, 2023

Since their first appearance in a tiny Paris theatre in 1953, Samuel Beckett’s iconic down-and- outs Vladimir and Estragon have rarely been off the stage. Nearly every evening, somewhere on the globe, they show up for their dubious appointment with a savior named Godot who never comes, filling time with games and musing aphoristically on existence. Hilarious and heartbreaking, Waiting for Godot is the modern theatre’s indispensable document of rootlessness, uncertainty, and perpetually postponed deliverance. Godot will be directed by Arin Arbus (Resident Director, TFANA) whose critically acclaimed productions for the company include her OBIE Award-winning staging of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. This production will reunite actors Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks, who last worked together for TFANA in Ionesco’s The Killer, directed by Darko Tresnjak in 2014.

Arin Arbus (Director) Resident Director, TFANA, and the company’s former Associate Artistic Director, for whom she directed Denis Johnson’s Des Moines, The Winter’s Tale, The Skin of Our Teeth (Obie Award), Strindberg’s The Father and Ibsen’s Doll’s House in rep, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Othello, and most recently the critically acclaimed The Merchant of Venice starring John Douglas Thompson. She directed Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Tony nom. for best revival) with Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon on Broadway. Arbus spent several years making theatre with prisoners in association with Rehabilitation Through the Arts and in 2018, she directed an adaptation of The Tempest in a refugee camp in Greece for The Campfire Project.

Theatre for a New Audience and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Present  

Soho Rep and the NAATCO National Partnership Project’s 

Public Obscenities

Written and Directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury

January 17 – February 18, 2024

Public Obscenities explores the pleasures and pitfalls of living in translation as it follows a queer studies PhD student returning to his family home in Kolkata with his Black American boyfriend.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a many-tentacled writer and director based in Brooklyn. A Mark O’Donnell Prize and Princess Grace Award recipient, Misha was an inaugural Project Number One Artist at Soho Rep, where he recently directed the world premiere of his playwriting debut Public Obscenities "with a swooning hypnotism reminiscent of the best works of neorealism" (New York Times, Critic's Pick). Co-produced by Soho Rep and NAATCO, Public Obscenities was nominated for three Drama League and four Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Direction, and the cast won the Drama Desk Ensemble Award for embodying "the transnational world" of Misha's "bilingual play with memorable authenticity, remarkable specificity, and extraordinary warmth.” Misha is also a Jonathan Larson Grant awardee for his body of work writing musical theater with composer Laura Grill Jaye; their as yet unproduced musical How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia was awarded the 2022 Relentless Award in honor of Adam Schlesinger and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Misha was also a collaborator on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns. Other recent collaborations: Brother, Brother (New York Theatre Workshop) with Aleshea Harris; SPEECH (Philly Fringe) with Lightning Rod Special; MukhAgni (Under the Radar @ The Public Theater) with Kameron Neal. A Sundance Fellow, Misha is the creator of VICHITRA, a series of short films including Englandbashi (Ann Arbor Film Festival); The Other Other (Ars Nova); An Anthology of Queer Dreams (Audio Unbound Award finalist); and In Order to Become (The Bushwick Starr). A NYSCA/NYFA, Fulbright, and Kundiman fellow in poetry, Misha has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Residencies: Hermitage, Ucross, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, SPACE on Ryder Farm, NYTW 2050, The Public’s Devised Theater Working Group, Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab, New York Stage and Film, Drama League, Mercury Store, BRIC. BA: Stanford. MFA: Columbia.

Theatre for a New Audience in association with Rose Theatre, London

present 

Macbeth (an undoing)

A Royal Lyceum Theatre Production

Written and Directed by Zinnie Harris

After Shakespeare

April 5 – April 28, 2024

When Zinnie Harris’ Macbeth (an undoing) made its world premiere at Royal Lyceum Theatre earlier this year, The Guardian praised the “audacious conjuring” of Macbeth and the “superb” Nicole Cooper in her turn as Lady Macbeth (which she’ll reprise for TFANA). The Scotsman wrote that “Cooper’s performance as Lady Macbeth grows deeper, richer and more fascinating with every passing scene.” In her acclaimed plays This Restless House and The Duchess (of Malfi), Harris reimagined classic texts, bringing the perspectives of their female characters center stage. Shakespeare’s iconic Lady Macbeth is ruthless and driven, unstoppable in her pursuit of power, yet she quickly descends into madness and despair. Harris' thrilling new version undoes the story we know, and remakes it, examining Lady Macbeth’s trajectory asking if we have really heard the whole story.

Zinnie Harris, Associate Artistic Director, Royal Lyceum, is a multi-award-winning playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She first came to prominence in 2000 with her early play Further Than the Furthest Thing (Tron Theatre/ Royal National Theatre) which won the Peggy Ramsay Playwriting Award, the John Whiting Award, and a Fringe First Award and has now been translated and performed all over the world.

Her recent plays include The Duchess (of Malfi) (Royal Lyceum Theatre, Citizens Theatre); Meet Me at Dawn (Traverse Theatre / Edinburgh International Festival); This Restless House (Citizens Theatre / National Theatre of Scotland / Edinburgh International Festival), winner of Best New Play at the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland 2016, and shortlisted for Susan Smith Blackburn Award and UK Theatre Awards Best New Play; and How to Hold Your Breath (Royal Court Theatre), winner of the Berwin Lee Award 2015.

Her adaptations for the stage include Rhinoceros (Edinburgh International Festival), A Doll’s House (Donmar Warehouse), Master Builder (West Yorkshire Playhouse), and Miss Julie (National Theatre of Scotland).

Her screen writing includes two 90-minute dramas for Channel 4 (Richard Is My Boyfriend and Born with Two Mothers), and episodes for the BBC1 Drama Spooks. She was lead writer and Series Creator for the BBC1 Agatha Christie adaptation Partners in Crime.

As a theatre director she has directed numerous main stage productions for the RSC, the Traverse Theatre, Royal Lyceum Theatre, and the Tron theatre. She won Best Director for the CATS 2017 for her direction of Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Lyceum Theatre and recently directed Scent of Roses at the Lyceum Theatre. She is an Associate Director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre and Professor of Playwriting and Screenwriting at the University of St. Andrews.

Season Subscriptions

Season subscriptions—with benefits including priority booking, flexible exchange policy, discounted guest tickets, discounts for the Book Kiosk in the Polonsky Shakespeare Center lobby, and more—are available online at tfana.org/season; by phone at (646) 553-3880; and in person at the box office.

2023-2024 subscription packages:

• Four Play Package ($195): One ticket to each show in the 2023-2024 Season at just $55 per ticket ($30 for Prometheus Firebringer). *Early Bird Special: $183, valid until Wednesday, August 9.
• Three Play Package ($146 for Three Play A, B, and C; $174 for Three Play D): One ticket to three productions of your choosing at just $58 per ticket ($30 for Prometheus Firebringer).
  • Three Play A: Prometheus Firebringer, Waiting for Godot, Public Obscenities
  • Three Play B: Prometheus Firebringer, Waiting for Godot, Macbeth (an undoing)
  • Three Play C: Prometheus Firebringer, Public Obscenities, Macbeth (an undoing)
  • Three Play D: Waiting for Godot, Public Obscenities, Macbeth (an undoing)
• Flex Pass Package ($240): a four-ticket package for just $60 per ticket. Use them in any combination for any of the shows in the 2023-2024 season (except Prometheus Firebringer).

Subscriber add-ons include Guest Tickets for $60 ($30 for Prometheus Firebringer) and New Deal Tickets for $20. Subscriber New Deal tickets—for those aged 30 and under, and for full-time students of any age—are available for all performances for $20 and can be purchased in advance or day-of online, by phone, or at the box office with valid ID(s) required at pickup.

All sales are final. No refunds. All packages are subject to a $10 handling fee.

2023-24 Single Tickets

Full-price tickets are $90-$100 ($45 for Prometheus Firebringer), and premium seats are $125. New Deal tickets— for those aged 30 and under, and for full-time students of any age—are available for all performances for $20 and can be purchased in advance or day-of online, by phone, or at the box office with valid ID(s) required at pickup. The calendar for every production this season will include one Sunday night Pay-What-You-Can performance. Audiences can purchase cash-only Pay-What-You-Can tickets at the door starting at 6:30pm that evening. Tickets are first come, first served, and limited to one ticket per patron.All productions, artists, and dates are subject to change.

About Theatre for a New Audience

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director, Dorothy Ryan, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. It nurtures artists, culture, and community. Recognizing that each audience is new and different from the last one, TFANA is dedicated to forging an exchange between artist and playgoer that is immediate and direct, and to the ongoing search for a living, human theatre.

With Shakespeare as its supreme guide, TFANA explores the ever-changing forms of world theatre and builds a dialogue spanning centuries between the language and ideas of Shakespeare and diverse authors, past and present. TFANA is committed to building long-term associations with artists from around the world and supporting the development of plays, translations, and productions through residences, workshops, and commissions. TFANA performs for an audience of all ages and backgrounds; is devoted to economic access; and promotes a vibrant exchange of ideas through its humanities and education programs.

TFANA’s productions have played nationally, internationally and on Broadway. In 2001, it became the first American theatre company invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

TFANA created and runs the largest in-depth program to introduce Shakespeare and classic drama in New York City’s Public Schools. Since its inception in 1984, the program has served more than 140,000 students.

In 2013, TFANA opened its first permanent home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center (PSC), in the Brooklyn Cultural District. The heart of PSC is its performance space: the 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, a uniquely flexible space with extraordinary acoustics, capable of multiple configurations between stage and audience; as well as the 50-seat Theodore C. Rogers Studio.

In addition to productions, TFANA supports ongoing artistic development through the Merle Debuskey Studio Program, which provides artists with residencies and workshops to create and explore outside the pressures of full production.

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