Alison Pill, Ngozi Anyanwu and More to be Featured in LAB: STRIPPED Series

59E59 Theaters and Co-Op Resident Company LAByrinth Theater Company will present the return of LAB: STRIPPED, LAByrinth's annual new play development series, now in its third season at 59E59 Theaters. 

LAB: STRIPPED offers audiences an intimate look at plays in process, with presentations designed to advance new work toward full production. The 2026 series will feature new plays by LAByrinth company members Cusi Cram and Lucy Thurber, with performances running February 10–March 01, 2026.

The series opens with Blanca & Ines, written by Cusi Cram and directed by Estefanía Fadul, Co-Artistic Director of Ensemble Studio Theatre. Presented in partnership with The Sol Project, the play will run February 10–14, 2026.

An unsentimental love story about women who want everything, Blanca & Ines explores ambition, authorship, and the cost of visibility in a world that fears women's talents and desires. The cast features Paola Lázaro and Ani Mesa-Perez. Lázaro is an acclaimed playwright and actor whose work includes Tell Hector I Miss Him (Atlantic Theater Company) and There's Always the Hudson (Woolly Mammoth/The Goodman), as well as television roles on The Walking Dead and Netflix's Obliterated. She will soon appear on Broadway in Dog Day Afternoon. Mesa-Perez recently appeared on Broadway in Oedipus, can be seen in the Sundance Award-winning film Superior, and just wrapped Destroy All Girls, her first feature as both writer and actor.

“LAByrinth's continued collaboration with The Sol Project grows out of a shared belief that theater should be a home for bold, necessary voices,” said LAByrinth Theater Company Co-Artistic Director Neil Tyrone Pritchard. “Lifting up the work of Cusi Cram, a pillar of our shared communities, is at the heart of that commitment.”

Following Blanca & Ines, LAB: STRIPPED continues with The Locus by Lucy Thurber, with six presentations running February 24–28, 2026.

The Locus is an intimate two-hander that examines what happens when the language you have no longer keeps the truth at bay and the ghosts away. It is a play about the stories we tell in order to bear the ones we can't.  

Thurber is an Obie Award-winning playwright whose work has been commissioned or produced by LAByrinth Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Rattlestick, and A.C.T among others. She has written films and television for HBO, Amazon, AMC, Hulu and Starz. The Locus will be helmed by Jenna Worsham, a New York-based stage director, writer, dramaturg and creative advocate who is known for her work at Rattlestick, The Cherry Lane, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Vertigo Theater and ART.

The cast features Ngozi Anyanwu and Alison Pill. Anyanwu is an actor, playwright, and director known for Good Grief, The Homecoming Queen, and The Monsters, recently produced by MTC/Two River Theater, which she also directed. Pill's work spans television, film, and theater, including Joe Mantello's Broadway production of Three Tall Women. She recently starred in Young Werther (TIFF 2024) and will next appear in the miniseries Unspeakable: The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey.