Clubbed Thumb Reveals Complete Lineup for 2024 SUMMERWORKS

Clubbed Thumb has revealed the complete line-up for the 27th SUMMERWORKS festival of new plays. SUMMERWORKS will run May 16 – June 29, 2024 at the wild project and will premiere three new plays.
 
With its track record of discovering and supporting rising talent – in many cases, providing writers with their first production in New York or anywhere – SUMMERWORKS is one of the most eagerly anticipated theatrical offerings of the year.
 
Artistic Director Maria Striar shared, “This year’s plays exist in wildly different landscapes and showcase marvelously different voices, but each asks: how do we lead a good life? What are the rules, what are the tools, and how do we know if we’re doing it right?”
 
“Every project in this year’s Summerworks, and each primary artist went through our early career development programs,” Striar continued. “We continue to be committed to elevating the next generation of artists at every level of our programming.”
 
Lastly, Striar notes, “These plays are really funny and the actors in them—just wait—are totally amazing.”
 
 
The full SUMMERWORKS 2024 line-up includes:
 

Usus

Written by T. Adamson
Directed by Emma Miller
May 16-28, 2024
 
It’s 1318 and six Franciscan friars are caught between the purity of their beliefs and a Pope who likes stuff. The it-shay is about to hit the an-fay.
 
T. ADAMSON is a Texas-raised writer and theater artist of Anglo/Mexican ancestry. He has developed new work with Vineyard Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, NYTW, Great Plains Theater Commons, Clubbed Thumb, JACK, Cutting Ball, Mercury Store, and many others. Plays include The Natural Horse (Alleyway Theatre), The Straights (JACK), and No Nothing (Vineyard Theatre Works in Progress). Awards include Rita and Burton Goldberg Playwriting Prize, Maxim Mazumdar Award, a Falco/Steinman Commission from Playwrights Horizons, and the 2022 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award from Vineyard Theatre. Lecturer of Playwriting at Purchase College. MFA: Hunter College.
 
EMMA MILLER is a director, educator & producer. She is Founding Artistic Director of The Hearth, with which she has directed several world premiere productions, including brainsmash, The Commons, and Athena. Emma has also directed at and with Ensemble Studio Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Less Than Rent, Queens Theatre, The Bridge Residency, and others. Emma was a Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellow and a Playwrights Horizons Fellow, and has worked at The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Dobama Theatre, and the Kenyon Playwrights Conference.

Coach Coach

Written by Bailey Williams
Directed by Sarah Blush
June 3-13, 2024
 
A group of coaches –  with the same credentials, but different specialties – gather for a weekend retreat. Some of them will leave as Platinum Practitioner Life Coaches with Dr. Meredith Martin’s Action Coach Academy for Thinking Coaches. Some of them will not.
 
BAILEY WILLIAMS is a writer, performer, and producer. Past productions: Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, written with Emma Horwitz, dir. Tara Elliott, The Exponential Festival in collaboration with New Georges, January 2024. Coach Coach, dir. Dara Malina, Clubbed Thumb’s Winterworks 2023. Events, dir. Sarah Blush, The Hearth at The Brick, December 2022; I thought I would die but I didn’t, dir. Sarah Blush, The Tank, May 2019; Buffalo Bailey’s Ranch for Gay Horses, Troubled Teen Girls and Other: a 90 Minute Timeshare Presentation, The Exponential Festival, January 2018. She was a 2022 MacDowell Fellow for Fiction and a member of the 2021-2022 Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group and Ars Nova’s 2022-2023 Play Group. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and was a recipient of the 2022 Audrey Residency with Emma Horwitz.  Her play, In the Basement, has been developed by Great Plains Theatre Conference (2023) and Portland Center Stage’s JAW Festival (2023). It received a UK production with Brooklyn Rep (dir. Charles Quittner, May 2023). MFA: Brooklyn College
 
SARAH BLUSH directs, writes and develops original projects for theatre, TV and more. She has developed and presented new plays and devised work with The Public Theater, Ars Nova, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, The Playwrights’ Center, JACK, The Bushwick Starr, The Brick, The Hearth, Lightning Rod Special, Williamstown Theatre Festival, HERE, Dixon Place, 59E59 and more, associate/assistant directed extensively, and directed/taught at NYU Graduate Acting, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and NYU Meisner, Playwrights Horizons, and Atlantic studios. She is a recipient of the Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellowship, New Georges Audrey Residency, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Colt Coeur Artist Residency, Barn Arts Residency, and New York Society Library’s Emerging Female Artist Grant. In addition to theatre, Sarah has directed virtual reality, interactive experiments in Google Sheets, experimental audio, and podcasts. Currently, Sarah has an original TV series (co-created with Sofya Levitsky-Weitz) in development with Lionsgate and Peacock.

Find Me Here

Written by Crystal Finn
Directed by Caitlin Sullivan
June 19-29, 2024
 
A patriarch dies at 100 years old and three sisters open his will. One sister is worried she is next. One sister is determined never to be next. One sister is becoming invisible.
 
Crystal Finn is an affiliated artist at Clubbed Thumb and has performed in seven seasons of Summerworks! As a writer she has also developed plays in Clubbed Thumb’s Early-career Writer’s Group and was a semi-finalist for the biennial commission in 2020. Her play Ms. Lilly was developed for Clubbed Thumb’s Directing Fellowship in 2022 with Josiah Davis. Other plays include The Faire produced by Fault Line Theatre, and her solo show Becoming Liv Ullmann. As an actor, she has originated roles in dozens of new plays. She made her Broadway acting debut in Birthday Candles by Noah Haidle for which she won a Theater World Award.  She is currently working on writing a book of personal essays about acting and theater. 
 
Caitlin Sullivan is a director and theater maker based in New York City. Recent work includes The Keep Going Songs (The Bengsons/LCT3), United States vs Gupta (Deepali Gupta/JACK & New Georges), Work Hard Have Fun Make History (reid tang/Clubbed Thumb), The Good John Proctor (Talene Monahon/Bedlam), Ohio (The Bengsons/Actors Theatre of Louisville), Sanctuary City (Martyna Majok/NYTW), Ole White Sugah Daddy (Obehi Janice/WP Theater), Panopticon (Gracie Gardner/Clubbed Thumb) and Cherie Dre (Sacha Yanow/Danspace). Caitlin was previously the Artistic Director of Seattle’s critically acclaimed Satori Group. Born and raised in Boston, MA, she is a graduate of Williams College, an alum of the Drama League Directors Project and Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellowship, and a New Georges Affiliate Artist.
 
Festival passes start at $75 and are on sale now at:  https://ci.ovationtix.com/36616/store/packages
 
Currently in performances is a return engagement of the Obie Award-winning Grief Hotel, which premiered as part of the 2023 Summerworks festival. Written by Liza Birkenmeier and directed by Tara Ahmadinejad, performances continue through April 27 at The Shiva Theater at The Public Theater. Grief Hotel is presented in partnership with New Georges.
 
Highlights from the previous 26 festivals include the NYC premieres of Gina Gionfriddo, Jordan Harrison, Lisa D'Amour, Jason Grote and Sarah Ruhl; professional debuts of Jaclyn Backhaus, Will Arbery, Clare Barron, Rinne Groff, Sylvan Oswald, Susan Soon-He Stanton and Ariel Stess; and new works by Anne Washburn, Adam Bock, Gregory Moss, Jenny Schwartz, Ethan Lipton, Erin Courtney, Sheila Callaghan, Tanya Saracho, and Heidi Schreck. Many of these artists continue to make Clubbed Thumb an artistic home.
 
Past SUMMERWORKS directors include Pam MacKinnon, Lee Sunday Evans, Lear deBessonet, Anne Kauffman, Robert O’Hara, Davis McCallum, Leigh Silverman, and Ken Rus Schmoll.
 
Clubbed Thumb made its Broadway debut in 2019 with Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, which premiered at the 2017 Summerworks festival, in partnership with True Love Productions. Clubbed Thumb’s second anthology, Unusual Stories, Unusually Told, was published in 2021 by Methuen Drama / Bloomsbury.
 

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