The Orchard Project Reveals 2026 Performance Lab Artists, Projects, and Summer Festival

The Orchard Project has announced the artists and companies selected for its 2026 Summer Performance Lab in Saratoga Springs, NY. The four-session residency program brings together 120 artists working on more than 30 projects over four weeks. The extraordinary range of theatrical voices represented includes world-renowned acrobatic circus ensemble Machine de Cirque, Academy Award-winning songwriter Markéta Irglova, Tony Award-winning playwright Doug Wright, and acclaimed Broadway director Christopher Ashley — alongside a new class of emerging and mid-career artists developing bold new work.

Two beloved New York companies, The Civilians and INTAR, join the 2026 Orchard Project as companies in residence, supported by grants from the New York State Council of the Arts. For the first time, a dedicated Homegrown Solo program invites standout comedian-performers including Aparna Nancherla, George Civeris, Michael Cruz Kayne, Jo Sunday, and Michael Abber to develop new solo work.

“This summer's cohort is one of the most ambitious we've ever assembled,” Ari Edelson, Founder and Artistic Director of The Orchard Project, said. “The range of imagination gathering at the Orchard Project is staggering. We are so proud to offer these artists the space, time, and community to do their bravest work.”

The 2026 OP artists' residencies begin on Monday, June 15. Work-in-progress public events will run from June 19 through July 11, culminating in an OP Comedy Week showcase and a Summer Arts Festival on July 7–11, which is open to the Saratoga Springs community and industry.

2026 Orchard Project Public Events

The Orchard Project Summer Arts Festival runs June 19 – July 11, 2026, in Saratoga Springs, NY. All locations shared upon RSVP. Most events are free and open to the public and industry but require RSVP. In order to RSVP and reserve your seats, please visit our online form.

• June 19 at 4 PM: Free Public Workshop — Machine de Cirque
• June 20 at 2 PM: The Civilians — Reading of If I Forget Thee, O Earth by Kate Douglas
• June 26 at 3 PM: The Civilians — Reading of Topia by Kate Tarker and I Hope This Letter Reaches Mictlán by Amalia Oliva Rojas
• July 7 at 7:30 PM: Performance: Big Stuff — Matt Baram & Naomi Snieckus with Kat Sandler
• July 8 at 7:30 PM: Interactive Performance: Elegy for a Former Best Friend — Swim Pony / Adrienne Mackey
• July 9 at 7:30 PM: Interactive Performance: Elegy for a Former Best Friend — Swim Pony / Adrienne Mackey
• July 9 at 9:30 PM: OP Comedy Week — Popup Showcase #1
• July 10 at 9:30 PM: OP Comedy Week — Popup Showcase #2
• July 11 at 11 AM: Reading of Find Me in the Mirror by Jordan Ramirez Puckett
• July 11 at 2 PM: Performance: Big Stuff — Matt Baram & Naomi Snieckus with Kat Sandler
• July 11 at 7 PM: Concert Reading: COAL — Nicholas Connors

Full calendar and additional events: orchardproject.com/summer26.
The online RSVP form is here: orchardproject.com/orchard-project-saratoga-events-seat-reservation-form.

2026 Performance Lab: June 15 – July 12, Saratoga Springs, NY

The Performance Lab provides four sessions of intensive residency for theatrical and interdisciplinary projects, featuring The Civilians and INTAR as companies in residence. Projects include:

• Machine de Cirque: The Great Nonsense (Working Title). Machine de Cirque returns with a new creation where humour, acrobatics, and absurdity collide joyfully to question… absolutely everything. In this agile, inventive, and deeply playful work, circus disciplines unfold like a series of existential hypotheses: free-standing ladders, oscillating pole, acrobatic bicycle, Korean plank, Chinese hoops. Each scene explores a powerful facet of the human condition: instinct resurfacing through group behaviour, competition warping our choices, and the shame triggered by the gaze of others.
• Susan Bernfield, Greta Gertler Gold, and Company: Available Hooks. After replacing the lead singer of a hit-rich ‘90s act, Beth's now spent the full-on middle of life — singleton to empty nest — inhabiting that other woman's songs, her youthful emotions, so what if tonight she breaks out into the present? A musical for solo performer and rock band.
• The Civilians — Kate Douglas (Company in Residence): If I Forget Thee, O Earth. An astronaut and a robot rehearsing a Mars mission in the Utah desert are interrupted by the discovery of fossils — sparking a conflict, with the arrival of a paleontologist, about whose work matters more in an age of mass extinction: the futurists or the historians?
• The Civilians — Kate Tarker (Company in Residence): Topia. An irreverent, multigenerational play about climate change and authoritarianism in Providence, Rhode Island.
• INTAR (Company in Residence) — Find Me in the Mirror: By Jordan Ramirez Puckett, directed by Alex Keegan. Find Me in the Mirror charts the twenty-year relationship of August and Cole – college sweethearts on parallel paths of trans identity — in this intimately tender two-hander that reflects the light and shadows that construct our relationship to ourselves and those we love.
• INTAR (Company in Residence) — I Hope This Letter Reaches Mictlán: By Amalia Oliva Rojas, directed by Marina Montesanti. I Hope This Letter Reaches Mictlán follows the grief-stricken Sarai as she attempts to harness her newly found shamanic powers to help her recently departed brother, whose soul is deported back to Mictlán, the Aztec underworld.
• Markéta Irglova & Sturla Mio Thorisson: Fair Play. A love story set against the backdrop of historic events leading up to The Velvet Revolution in 1989, where students came together in peaceful protests across the country lasting 10 days and resulting in the fall of a 40-year rule of the Czech communist party.
• Doug Wright, David Clement, & Christopher Ashley: The Blaster's Handbook. A rock ‘n' roll musical that traces the rise of the Weather Underground, an affluent group of young radicals who engage in acts of domestic terrorism in hopes of bringing a swift end to the Vietnam War.
• abs wilson & Adam LaPorte: Kelly Nowak. Kelly Nowak is a 90-minute musical framed as a true crime documentary that explores the unsolved disappearance of 16-year-old Kelly Nowak, and 18 years later, what her family believes happened to her, examining the desire to find any kind of tangible truth — no matter the rationality or cost.
• Deniz Khateri: Husks from Iran. A shadow puppetry performance about Iranian artists in exile through visual translation of their poems with puppets designed inspired by Persian calligraphy.
• The Horgles (Ceilbí Guilfoyle & Kyle Moss): Weird World with Jim Horgletooth. Jim Horgletooth travels the globe and investigates the fringes of society, embracing the fantastic and the odd. The catch is the host is a puppet!
• Keith Bunin & Tyne Rafaeli: The Loyal Opposition. On the night their restaurant doesn't open, three old friends cook a meal for each other that transports them through time, backward into their combustible shared histories, and forward into their deeply uncertain futures.
• travis tate (Writer in Residence): Judy Garland in… Extinction! Judy Garland in… Extinction! is a queer-cabaret-extravaganza where Judy Garland leads us into the end of the world — but what will be left after it all ends? Directed by Adam L Sussman.
• Obed De la Cruz: ARE YOU ARE. Adapted from the 1920 Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, ARE YOU ARE is a robotic nightclub fantasy inspired by the queer performance and exuberance of 1990s New York City nightlife.
• Cris Eli Blak (Writer in Residence): Sing For Me. A rising Black musician is offered stardom, on one condition: her voice will be heard, but her face will be replaced by an AI-generated white avatar.
• Vichet Chum (Writer in Residence): Untitled. The play follows the US government's investigation of Douglas Latchford, the preeminent broker of stolen Khmer artifacts and his network of curators, collectors, and looters.
• Nicholas Connors: COAL (Concert Reading, July 11). Deep in the hills of West Virginia, a young coal miner fights for his shot at the American Dream while the world around him devolves into chaos and the 1921 West Virginia Coal Wars.
• Zoë Kim (Writer in Residence): FAMISHED [같/DD;]. A new family is in town and they've got a monster problem to fix and a killer secret to hide. All they want is to live a normal life but that isn't easy when staying alive involves a lot of murder. Participating in the local biotech company's clinical trial might be their only solution, but at what cost? FAMISHED [같/DD;] is a story about family, belonging, and what it means to be human.
• Adrienne Mackey / Swim Pony: Elegy for a Former Best Friend. Elegy for a Former Best Friend is a participatory theater work in which a live audience reconstructs a real-life friendship breakup, using a projected script and archive of texts and voice recordings to collectively examine loss, memory, and the limits of our capacity to understand another person.
• Emma Horwitz & Bailey Williams (Two Sisters): My Evil Wife. Inspired by an old episode of television, My Evil Wife is a new performance piece by Two Sisters.
• Matt Baram & Naomi Snieckus: Big Stuff. A play about memory, meaning, and the stuff we leave behind. Co-created and directed by Kat Sandler, assistant directed by Rachel Moore.
• Rachel Mars: Megan Is a Welder. A solo work about metal-working, remembrance, and queer futurity.

2026 Homegrown Solo — OP Comedy Week (July 6–12)

New for 2026, the Homegrown Solo program invites solo performance and stand-up comedy artists to develop new work in residence, with popup showcases on July 9 and 10. Participants include Aparna Nancherla, Jo Sunday, Michael Cruz Kayne, Michael Abber, and George Civeris.

2026 Episodic Homegrown Lab

• Desdemona Chiang & Kevin Kenerly: SMALL room. In the 1990's abandoned city of Detroit, a guileless young woman is exposed to a world of neglected crimes when she takes a job developing photos for the police homicide department.
• Kelsey Fox: Bad Brothers is an hour-long melo-dramedy where a young risk manager in a fraternity (think Olivia Pope in Vineyard Vines and a crew cut) must keep his frat out of trouble to rise from his small-town upbringing to aspirations of greatness. His job gets harder when the rebellious son of a Senator starts a drug ring.
• Brett Maline: A live interactive show experience that explores the disabled POV.

2026 Greenhouse/Homegrown Lab

The Greenhouse/Homegrown Lab is a year-long development program for multidisciplinary playwrights. 2026 participants:

• Nia Akilah Robinson: Canard. A bicontinental tragedy between generations of parents and their children.
• Alexa Derman: Iphigenia. A taut thriller about patriarchy, desire, and a daughter on a boat on a sea without wind.
• Nelson Díaz-Marcano: Alejo, A tragedy. An informant invites the audience into the lie that exposes an entire country.

About The Orchard Project

The Orchard Project is where new works are seeded, nurtured, and grown. It is an expansive creative space for new plays, new musicals, new television shows, and new forms of dramatic storytelling. The Orchard Project serves creators and producers through form-fitting labs, workshops, and other support in New York City, Saratoga Springs, and online, that propel innovative projects forward. Operating in New York City, Saratoga Springs, and online, it has nurtured over 1,500 artists, with works premiering on Broadway, the West End, and globally, earning Obies, Drama Desks, and a 2014 Tony Award for Best Play for All The Way. The 2026 Performance Lab is supported by The New York State Council on the Arts, the Upstate Theater Coalition, The Richenthal Foundation, The John Golden Fund, The Dake Family Foundation, The Venturous Theatre Fund, and individual donors.

Learn more at orchardproject.com/summer26.