Manhattan Theatre Club Reveals New Sloan Playwrighting Commissions & Evening of Excerpts at the American Museum of Natural History

The latest recipients have been announced for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Initiative commissions for new theatrical works surrounding themes of science, math, and technology. The commissioned writers are Nkenna Akunna, Preston Max Allen, Amy Berryman, Liza Birkenmeier & Zack Zadek, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Alexa Derman, Alex Lin, Sam Grabiner, Keiko Green, Dylan Guerra, Yilong Liu, and Danielle Stagger.

“We are excited to have commissioned a new class of exceptional artists who represent some of the most thrilling talent working in theater today,” said Scott Kaplan, Manhattan Theatre Club’s Director of Play Development. “We are grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for over 20 years of supporting this program that brings crucial and fascinating scientific topics to theatrical life.”

Through the Sloan Initiative, Manhattan Theatre Club will also partner with the American Museum of Natural History to present a live public reading of excerpts from three MTC/Sloan commissions in progress, followed by a conversation between playwrights and scientists. Taking place in the David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center in the Museum’s new Richard Gilder Center for Science for Science, Education, and Innovation, the October 16th event marks the second iteration of this collaboration. It will feature excerpts from Dylan Guerra, Jessica Huang, and Caroline V. McGraw, directed by Caitlin Sullivan, followed by a panel discussion with the playwrights and scientists that include Museum Curator Ruth Angus of the Department of Astrophysics, Rohit Base, Ph. D. student in the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs in the University of Pittsburgh, Jackie Faherty, Museum senior scientist in the Department of Astrophysics, and Ross MacPhee, curator emeritus in the Museum’s Department of Mammalogy. The conversation will explore how theater can help us understand topics like emerging technologies, astronomy, and biodiversity loss. More information is available on the Museum’s website.

“We’re delighted to partner with MTC to support the commissioning of a new, exciting suite of plays with science and technology themes and characters,” said Doron Weber, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “This year’s recipients are a diverse group of talented writers grappling with controversial scientific theories, the benefits and cost of idealism in science, and the impact of artificial intelligence. We look forward to seeing three promising MTC/Sloan commissions come to life at the American Museum of Natural History next month.”

Nkenna Akunna is an Igbo playwright and performer from London whose work primarily explores friendship, time, and various dimensions of Black femme life. Plays include Some Of Us Exist in the Future (2022 Bruntwood Prize longlist; 2021 Papatango Prize; 2021 Neukom Institute Literary Award for Playwriting second place; 2021 Women’s Prize in Playwriting shortlist; UK audio tour inc. Bush Theatre, Everyman Theatre Liverpool, Theatr Clwyd, Leeds Playhouse, Bristol Old Vic, Lyric Theatre Belfast), cheeky little brown (Bushwick Starr, Brown University), good god (VoxFest, Brown University), Good Fit (2020 Rosa Parks Playwriting Award, 2020 Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award second place, Theatre Renegade, The Dare Tactic), a meal (Polaroid Theatre).

Preston Max Allen (he/him) is a playwright, composer, and lyricist whose work has been featured at the New Amsterdam Theatre, Lincoln Center, Signature Theatre, Musical Theatre Factory, and more. Preston conceived and wrote the 2019 Off-Broadway musical We Are the Tigers (album now streaming); Agent 355 (dramaturgy/co-book Jessica Kahkoska); and The Rage: Carrie 2, An Unauthorized Musical Parody (Jeff Nominee, Best New Musical). Plays: Modern Gentleman (2022 New York Stage and Film summer workshop); Caroline (2021 Ars Nova Out Loud); and Storytime. Preston created and co-produced the 2021 concert event A Place for Us: Celebrating Trans and Nonbinary Artists in Musical Theatre. He is a member of the Writers Guild of America East, Ars Nova Play Group (2019-21), and an alum of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

Amy Berryman is a playwright, screenwriter, actor, and teaching artist originally from Seattle by way of West Texas. Her play Walden, produced by Sonia Friedman and directed by Ian Rickson, premiered on London’s West End in May 2021. Walden was also produced at TheaterWorks Hartford in August 2021 and was a NYT Critic’s Pick. Other full-length plays include The New Galileos (O’Neill Finalist 2019); Three Year Summer; Epiphany, Or What Would You? (finalist for Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries, O'Neill Semi-Finalist 2020); and The Whole of You. The short film she wrote, co-produced, and starred in, “You Are Everywhere” won Best Drama in the LA Short Film Festival 2018. She is currently working on an original scripted podcast for Gimlet and Composition 8 and has TV projects in development with Warner Bros. Television and Phenomenal Media. Amy was recently named a member of Center Theatre Group's Writers' Workshop 2023. amy-berryman.com

Liza Birkenmeier was the Tow Playwright-in-Residence at Ars Nova where her play Dr. Ride’s American Beach House premiered (Finalist for The Lambda Literary Award in Drama). Honestly Sincere appeared online in collaboration with TiQ. Islander, devised with collaborator KATIE BROOK, premiered live at HERE in August of 2021. F*ck7thGrade, a musical collaboration with Jill Sobule, premiered at the Wild Project in October 2022 (Drama Desk Nomination for Outstanding Musical and finalist for The Lambda Literary Award in Drama). Grief Hotel will premiere in Summerworks at Clubbed Thumb in June 2023, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad. Her work has also been developed at The Public Theater, Dixon Place, Catch, Prelude, University Settlement, Lincoln Center, and elsewhere. She is a New Georges Resident Artist, and a Hambidge, MacDowell, Millay, and Yaddo Fellow.

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 directed the world premiere of his play Public Obscenities "with a swooning hypnotism reminiscent of the best works of neorealism" (New York Times, Critic's Pick). The production, described by The New Yorker as "gorgeously precise," is nominated for three Drama League and four Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Direction of a Play. Misha was also awarded a Jonathan Larson Grant for his body of work writing musicals with composer Laura Grill Jaye; their most recent collaboration, How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia, was awarded the 2022 Relentless Award. Other 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; Your Healing Is Killing Me (PlayMakers Rep) with Virginia Grise. Misha was also a soloist and collaborator on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns. An inaugural Sundance Asian American 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), which he is developing into a live Carnatic opera. Misha is also an alumnus of New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group, Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, New York Stage and Film Nexus, the Sundance Art of Practice Fellowship, The Drama League’s Next Stage Residency, and Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab. 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. BA: Stanford. MFA: Columbia.

Alexa Derman writes adventurous plays about gender, genre, systems, and speculation. Her works include The Creature (O'Neill NPC Finalist), PSYCHOPSYCHOTIC (Relentless Award Honorable Mention), Girlish (Fresh Ink), Restoration Master Reset (Cutting Ball in Ways to Leave a Body), and I’ll be in my Hanukkah palace (sold-out at Ars Nova ANT Fest). Finalist: Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship, Jewish Plays Project, Seven Devils; semifinalist: Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Irons in the Fire; long-list: Theatre 503 International Playwriting Prize (x2). Other honors and experiences include: nomination for the Cherry Lane Mentor Project, L Arnold Weissberger Award, and the Susan Smith Blackburn; the Orchard Project’s Audio Lab; selection as a Playwrights Center Core Apprentice; and recently working as a staff writer on a Netflix series. BA from Yale in Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies; brand-new MFA from Brown, where she studied under Julia Jarcho. alexaderman.com

Sam Grabiner is a playwright based in London. His play Boys on the Verge of Tears is the winner of The Verity Bargate Award and will be produced at the Soho Theatre in London in 2024. He is developing new work whilst on attachment at The National Theatre Studio and he is a MacDowell Fellow. Sam is a graduate of the clown school L’ecole Philippe Gaulier and of The Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers' Programme. He holds an MFA in playwriting from Columbia School of the Arts, where he studied under Lynn Nottage and David Henry Hwang. Alongside his theatre work he is developing his debut feature with 2AM.

Keiko Green (she/her) is a playwright, screenwriter, and performer based in Los Angeles and Seattle. She is a Core Company Member at ACT, the 2023 Resident Playwright at Chance Theatre, and previously part of Seattle Rep’s Writers Group and Theatre Mu’s Mu Tang Clan. Previous productions include: Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play (Old Globe), Sharon (Cygnet Theatre), Hometown Boy (Actors Express/Seattle Public Theater), and Nadeshiko (Sound Theatre Company). Her plays have been developed/produced by the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Old Globe, the Kennedy Center, the National New Play Network, Playwrights Realm, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Atlantic Theatre Company. She currently holds commissions from The Old Globe, and Seattle Shakespeare Company. As a screenwriter, she wrote on Hulu’s upcoming “Interior Chinatown.” As an actor, she has performed at theaters nationwide and originated the role of Connie in Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap at the Denver Center and Seattle Rep. BFA: NYU Drama - Experimental Theatre Wing, MFA: UCSD Playwriting.

Dylan Guerra is a queer latine writer/director based in Brooklyn. He's an alum of Ars Nova's Play Group and P73's I73, and a current member of EST's Youngblood. He is the recipient of the Winegarden Commission at Playwrights Horizons. He recently wrote on the third season of HBO Max's “The Other Two” and has various TV projects in development at A24, Family Owned, Temple Hill, and JAX. He also has a feature film in development with Picture Start & Get Lftd. His solo-show Find Him recurs periodically around New York.

Alex Lin is just a girl from Jersey. Her work as a playwright has been developed with Manhattan Theatre Club, Ma-Yi, Magic Theatre, the O'Neill, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Theater Mu, The COOP, South Coast Rep, and Central Square Theater. As a producer for A24's Supercluster, she's collaborated with NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and the culture it inspires. She is currently under commission at South Coast Rep. Juilliard - Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program 23-24. Accolades: 2022 New Harmony Project finalist, 2022 O'Neill Conference finalist, 2022 Elizabeth George commission, 2023 Weissberger New Play Award nominee.

Yilong Liu is a Lila Acheson Wallace American playwriting fellow at The Juilliard School. His play The Book of Mountains and Seas received the Lambda Literary Award for Drama. His play Good Enemy had its premiere off-Broadway at Minetta Lane Theatre as part of Audible Theater’s 22/23 season. Yilong is a Core Writer at Playwrights’ Center and has developed work with Ojai Playwrights Conference, EST/Youngblood, Kennedy Center, Space on Ryder Farm, among others. Other awards include Kennedy Center's Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award. His plays include The Book of Mountains and Seas, June is The First Fall, Joker, PrEP Play, or Blue Parachute, and Good Enemy. Yilong grew up in China and received his MFA from University of Hawai‘i.

Danielle Stagger is a playwright and performer from Queens, NY. Danielle’s plays largely explore questions of performance, respectability, and shame through a lens of the appropriate and the forbidden. Her work prioritizes the authentic presence of Blackness, queerness, and womanhood both on and off stage. As an artist in practice, she places particular emphasis on creating in community, and continually works to decentralize and destabilize the product-driven, linear theatrical process. She has developed work at Second Stage Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Performance Space New York, Dragon Theatre, and Stanford Repertory Theater. Her work has been a finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Ollie New Play Award, and the Lark's Venturous Playwrights Fellowship. Danielle holds a B.A. in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Playwriting at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.

Zack Zadek is a musical theatre writer and songwriter signed to Warner/Chappell. He was named by Playbill magazine as “a contemporary musical theatre writer you should know” and won the Weston New Musical Award for his show Deathless which had its world premiere at Goodspeed Musicals in 2017 directed by Tina Landau (The SpongeBob Musical). Zack is a two time MacDowell Fellow in addition to residencies at Yaddo, UCross, VCCA, and the Dramatist’s Guild Foundation. A three-time Kleban Prize and three-time Jonathan Larson Award finalist, he received the inaugural New Voices award from NMI/Disney Imagineering and is an artist-in-residence with SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Civilians, and The Orchard Project. Zack is currently writing musicals under commission from Ars Nova, Jill Furman Productions (Hamilton), Arena Stage, and has several film/TV projects under development. His first album will be released by Warner Music this fall.

Since 2001, MTC has awarded over 100 commissions through the Sloan Foundation Program. MTC first collaborated with the Sloan Foundation in 2000 on the production of David Auburn’s Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Proof. MTC's partnership with the Sloan Foundation has expanded to include multiple annual commissions for writers as well as production grants to stage Sloan-related works. In addition to Proof, Sloan supported MTC’s productions of Charlotte Jones’ Humble Boy, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation of An Enemy of the People, Sharr White’s The Other Place, Nell Benjamin’s The Explorers Club, Nick Payne’s Constellations and Incognito, Bess Wohl’s Continuity, and Anchuli Felicia King’s Golden Shield.

Since partnering with the Sloan Foundation, MTC has commissioned the following writers: Brittany K. Allen, Kevin Armento, Kate Attwell, Jeff Augustin, Courtney Baron & Juliana Nash, Jaclyn Backhaus, Clare Barron, Stephen Belber, Nell Benjamin, Glen Berger, Eboni Booth, Nina Braddock, J. Nicole Brooks, Sarah Burgess, Christopher Chen, Mia Chung, Steve Cosson, EV Crowe, Lisa D’Amour, April De Angelis, Noah Diaz, Jessica Dickey, Charles Evered, Diane Exavier, Kendall Feaver, Stella Feehily, Halley Feiffer & Joshua Schmidt, Selina Fillinger, Nick Gandiello, Gracie Gardner, Madeleine George, Melissa James Gibson, Daniel Goldfarb, Franky D. Gonzalez, Rinne Groff, Dipika Guha, Alan Harris, Tom Holloway, Phillip Howze, Jessica Huang, Sam Hunter, Ron Hutchinson, Julia Izumi, Nathan Jackson, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Nick Jones, Deirdre Kinahan, Lucy Kirkwood, Bryony Lavery, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Kenneth Lin, Ethan Lipton, Craig Lucas, Martyna Majok, Caroline V. McGraw, Michael Mitnick, Peter Morris, Hannah Moscovitch, Itamar Moses, Rona Munro, Brett Neveu, Barney Norris, Charlie Oh, Ife Olujobi, Jiehae Park, Nick Payne, Greg Pierce, Max Posner, Mansa Ra, Hannie Rayson, Stacey Rose, Melissa Ross, Heidi Schreck, Mark Schultz, Jen Silverman, Eric Simonson, Charly Evon Simpson, Kristin Slaney, Al Smith, Dava Sobel, Celine Song, Deborah Stein, Simon Stephens, Shelagh Stephenson, Andrew Thompson, Sarah Treem, Catherine Trieschmann, James Anthony Tyler, John Walch, Anne Washburn, Jason Wells, Else Went, Michael West, Beau Willimon, Bess Wohl, Alexandra Wood, Alexis Zegerman, and Anna Ziegler.

Test and expand your Broadway knowledge with our new game - The Broadway Match-Up! How well do you know your Broadway casting trivia?	Play the Daily Game, explore current shows, and delve into past decades like the 2000s, 80s, and the Golden Age. Challenge your friends and see where you rank!
How well do you know your Tony Awards history? Take our never-ending quiz of nominations and winner history and challenge your friends.	Can you beat your friends? Play today’s daily Broadway word game, featuring a new theatrically inspired word or phrase every day!