World Premiere Plays & More Set for Signature Theatre 2024-25 Season

Signature Theatre has unveiled its 2024/2025 Season, the ninth and final season of works programmed by outgoing Artistic Director Paige Evans and the culmination of Sarah Ruhl and Dominique Morisseau’s critically-acclaimed residencies with the company.

Featuring three Signature commissions and one revisitation of a beloved previous work, the season showcases Signature’s support for writers at multiple phases of careers, introducing audiences to both their never-before-seen works and finding new and timeless resonances in earlier material.

Across its three residency models—all represented in works presented this season—Signature offers playwrights a sustained, nurturing site for the evolution of their art, deepening audiences’ relationships to these singular visions over the course of numerous productions.

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Signature Theatre 2024/2025 Season

Fish

Written by Melis Aker
Directed by Tatiana Pandiani
September 2024
 
2016, London. Karya, a British-Turkish teen, embarks on a mission to confront the unresolved disappearance of her brother. While her mother pushes them into swimming lessons as a coping mechanism, Karya finds solace in another pursuit: catfishing ISIS with her best friend. Fish is a daring coming-of-age story from Signature’s first Launchpad resident playwright, Melis Aker.

Melis Aker is a writer, actor and musician from Turkey, based between London and New York. She was named a Woman to Watch by the Broadway Women’s Fund and received the Sundance Interdisciplinary Program grant & NY Community Trust/Van Lier Fellowship. She’s developing a series with Skybound Entertainment, is Signature Theatre’s LaunchPad Resident, and Theatre503’s 503Five writer. She has developed work with the Atlantic Theatre Company, NYTW, Playing on Air (Scraps and Things starring Carol Kane, featured on NYT), Homebound Project (Fractio Panis starring Brian Cox and Nicole Ansari-Cox, dir. Tatiana Pandiani), Ars Nova (Play Group), PlayCo, DGF, Roundabout, New Group, O’Neill, 24 Hour Plays, Finborough, the Park, and has been named on the Kilroys’ List. She co-created the bilingual musical AZUL (Jonathan Larson grant, NYC Women's Fund) alongside Jacinta Clusellas and Tatiana Pandiani. She worked on the development of a screenplay with Revelations Entertainment, and is in post-production for her film “Baba in Graceland,” dir. Marc Atkinson Borrull. In 2024, Melis will develop the musical play Hundred Feet Tall with Benjamin Scheuer and Katy Rudd at the Old Vic, her commissioned plays Fish at Signature and Murmurs at Theatre503, and will be completing her debut novel. Representation: CAA.
 

Bad Kreyol

World Premiere
Written by Dominique Morisseau
Directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene
Fall 2024
 
Dominique Morisseau completes her Signature residency with this beautiful world premiere production about interrogating cultural identity and global impact. Simone, 1st generation Haitian American, and her cousin Gigi, Haitian born and raised, reunite to honor their grandmother’s dying wish for them to reconnect. Simone’s pilgrimage back to her ancestral homeland forces both cousins to confront their differing world views, the presence of NGOs in Haiti, and the plagued relationship between Haiti and the U.S.
 
Dominique Morisseau is the author of The Detroit Project (A 3-Play Cycle): Skeleton Crew (Atlantic Theater Company/Broadway, Tony Award nomination for Best Play), Paradise Blue (Signature Theatre), and Detroit ’67 (Public Theater, Classical Theatre of Harlem and NBT). Additional plays include Confederates (Signature Theatre), Pipeline (Lincoln Center Theater), Sunset Baby (LAByrinth Theatre), Blood at the Root (National Black Theatre), and Follow Me To Nellie’s (Premiere Stages). She is the Tony Award–nominated bookwriter on the Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations (Imperial Theatre) and is currently working on her latest, Hippest Trip - The Soul Train Musical (ACT). TV/Film: Co-Producer on Shameless (Showtime), the film adaptation of the documentary STEP (Fox Searchlight), and consultant on the Netflix animated feature, Tunga. Awards include: PoNY Fellowship, TEER Trailblazer Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, Audelco Awards, NBFT August Wilson Playwriting Award, Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, OBIE Award (two), Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, one of Variety’s Women of Impact for 2018, and a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow. In 2022, Dominique was awarded the key to the city by the Mayor of Detroit
 

Grangeville

World Premiere
Written by Samuel D. Hunter
Winter 2025
 
Across a void of thousands of miles and oceans of hurt, two half-brothers tentatively reconnect over the care of their ailing mother. Grangeville is a new play about the fallibility of memory, the stories we tell to make sense of our suffering, and the complexity of forgiveness.

Samuel D. Hunter grew up in Moscow, Idaho and lives in New York City with his husband and daughter. His plays include The Whale (Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, GLAAD Media Award, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play), A Case for the Existence of God (New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, Hull-Warriner Award), A Bright New Boise (Obie Award, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), Greater Clements (Drama Desk nomination for Best Play, Outer Critics Circle Honoree), Lewiston/Clarkston (Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Few, A Great Wilderness, Rest, Pocatello, The Healing, and The Harvest, among others. His screenplay adaptation of The Whale, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Brendan Fraser, was nominated for the 2023 BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and received two Oscars, including Best Actor. He was also a writer and producer on all four seasons of FX’s Baskets. He is the recipient of a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, a 2012 Whiting Writers Award and an honorary doctorate from the University of Idaho. He holds degrees in playwriting from NYU, The Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and Juilliard.

​​Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice

Directed by Les Waters
Spring 2025
 
In life, Eurydice loves books, and Orpheus is a great musician. One of the few heroines who dies twice, she falls to the underworld on her wedding day. In death, she reunites with her father and remembers her life again. Les Waters directs an innovative reimagining of one of Sarah Ruhl’s most beloved plays, inspired by a classic myth. 

Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, essayist and poet. Her plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play; The Clean House; Passion Play;  Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Melancholy Play; For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday; The Oldest Boy; Stage Kiss; Dear Elizabeth; Eurydice; Orlando; Late: a cowboy song; and a translation of Three Sisters. She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony award nominee. Her plays have been produced on and Off-Broadway, around the country, and internationally where they have been translated into over fifteen languages. Recent: Letters from Max, a ritual, premiered at Signature Theatre, 2023; Becky Nurse of Salem premiered at Lincoln Center, 2022.

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