2026 New Stages Festival Lineup Revealed at The Goodman

New plays will ring in the new year at The Goodman when the popular annual New Stages Festival returns. This year’s line-up features the newest works by some of the country’s hottest playwrights, including This Part of His Life Blooms by Christina Anderson (the ripple, the wave that carried me home); The Audience Unseen by Ike Holter (Lottery Day); Pennies by Hansol Jung (Wolf Play) and FEAST! by Calamity West (In the Canyon). Under Walter Artistic Director Susan V. Booth and Director of New Works Kat Zukaitis, this annual offering showcases works-in-progress; each play will be read twice in the intimate 350-seat Owen Theatre. New Stages is offered as part of The Goodman’s 100 Free Acts of Theater initiative, a citywide yearlong event presented together with Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) which activates each of Chicago’s 50 wards with free arts programming.

Theater industry professionals are invited to Professionals Weekend (January 16-18), which includes special events and opportunities for networking—including the new Dramatists Exchange initiative, a multi-day event which gathers Chicago Dramatists for workshops and dialogue with New Stages artists and Goodman artistic staff.

New Stages appears January 11-18; tickets are free and available starting December 15 at the Box Office (170 N. Dearborn), over the phone at 312.443.3800 or online at GoodmanTheatre.org/NewStagesFestival. Theater professionals interested in Industry Weekend should RSVP by December 19 at GoodmanTheatre.org/ProfessionalsWeekend. The Goodman is grateful for the support of The Joyce Foundation (Major Support for Diverse Artistic and Professional Development).

Since New Stages’ 2004 inception, more than 125 plays have been produced as developmental productions and staged readings. The Goodman’s Centennial 25/26 Season includes three works that debuted as New Stages readings—Lee Kirk’s Ashland Avenue, Zayd Ayers Dohrn and Tom Morello’s Revolution(s) and Marco Antonio Rodriguez’s English adaptation of Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, running February 21 – April 5, 2026.

2026 NEW STAGES FESTIVAL LINE-UP 

FEAST! 

By Calamity West
Directed by Susan V. Booth
Readings: January 11 at 2pm and January 17 at 2pm 

Carol just got fired. Her husband Michael has already paid for the company’s $12,000 holiday dinner. Instead of canceling, they decide to go through with it — to host the meal no one asked for and prove they still belong at the table. But when no guests arrive, the night spirals into a brutal showdown over money, marriage, and the cost of holding on, where the only thing left to swallow is the truth. Calamity West's FEAST! is a darkly comic pressure cooker about privilege and power.

Calamity West is an award-winning playwright and educator whose work has been developed and produced nationally at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Public, Roundabout Underground, The Goodman Theatre, and Jackalope Theatre Company – to name a few. From 2022 to 2026 she is in residency at Primary Stages through the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group, where she has written FEAST! and Sgt. Hank Cole’s Drama Club of Algona. She is concluding her residency with Parallax (2026), a new play exploring community, power, and the fragile order of HOAs. West teaches at the University of Chicago, the Einhorn School of Performing Arts, Webster University, and through the Jackalope Playwrights Lab, which she founded in 2018. 

Pennies 

By Hansol Jung 
Directed by Patricia McGregor 
Readings: January 13 at 7pm and January 16 at 7pm

Amid an epidemic of heartbreak, a weary counselor with a unique gift disappears. She finds herself in a surreal motel outside time, where she must strike a cosmic bargain with Charon, the ferryman of the dead. Spanning centuries, from a call center to the River Styx to the farthest future, Hansol Jung’s Pennies is a wild, aching odyssey about grief, guilt and the impossible task of caring too much in a world that keeps trying to harden us. 

Hansol Jung’s works include Last Call (En Garde Arts), Merry Me (NYTW), Wolf Play (Soho Rep & Ma-Yi), Wild Goose Dreams (Public Theater & La Jolla), Romeo and Juliet (NAATCO & Two River) Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi), and No More Sad Things (Boise Contemporary). TV & Film: Pachinko (Apple +), Tales of the City (Netflix) including development with Amazon Studios, and Apple + TV. Hansol is the recipient of the Lucille Lortel award for Best Play, Obie Award, Herb Alpert Award, Steinberg Award, Whiting Award, Helen Merrill Award, Hodder Fellowship, Page 73 Fellowship, Lark’s Rita Goldberg Fellowship, NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship, three-time MacDowell Fellowship, and International Playwrights Residency at Royal Court. She is a proud member of NYTW’s Usual Suspects, the Kilroys and a founding member of The Pack.  

This Part of His Life Blooms 

By Christina Anderson 
Directed by Malkia Stampley 
Readings: January 14 at 7pm and January 18 at 11am 

Arthur Beverly James finds himself alone on the night of his retirement. After a lifetime of loving and losing the same woman, Arthur turns to the soil—to the yard he’s ignored for decades—and begins to dig. With each seed, each root, each memory, he reckons with friendship, fatherhood and the quiet ghosts of his past. In Christina Anderson’s This Part of His Life Blooms, grief becomes growth as a man learns, at last, to tend the garden of himself. 

Christina Anderson’s plays include: the ripple, the wave that carried me home, How to Catch Creation, and pen/man/ship. Her work has been produced across the country including theaters such as Berkeley Rep, Goodman Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, and Yale Rep. A Tony nominated writer for Outstanding Book of a Broadway musical, Anderson has received the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, the Horton Foote Prize, and the United States Artists Fellowship, among many other honors. She is the author of Three Plays by Christina Anderson, a collection of her work published by Tripwire Harlot Press. She’s taught playwriting at Rutgers University, SUNY Purchase, Wesleyan University, Brown, and YSD. Since 2019, she’s also been exploring music production under the moniker Purely Magenta, creating hip-hop instrumentals that reflect her inquisitive spirit. Current writing project: a book that explores playwriting as an accessible artistic life practice. 

The Audience Unseen 

By Ike Holter 
Directed by Gus Menary 
Dramaturgy by Sarah Slight 
Readings: January 17 at 7pm and January 18 at 3pm 

In a flickering interrogation room, a federal agent pushes a grocery clerk to "see" what no one else can. But what starts as a simple questioning spirals into something more terrifying than either party could ever imagine. Ike Holter's The Audience Unseen is a supernatural thriller, told in real-time, about the steep cost of traveling into darkness.