En Garde Arts Unveils 2025-2026 Season With Premieres By Hansol Jung & Dustin Wills and More

En Garde Arts has revealed its upcoming 2025-2026 Season that includes two world premieres and five projects in development including two new commissions. A pioneer of site-specific performance in New York City since 1986, En Garde Arts has a globally-recognized history of creative excellence, and continues to push the boundaries of where theater can happen and who it can reach.

Hamburger says, “We produce new work from the ground up that is site-specific, socially resonant, and driven by a sense of place, creating experiences that immerse audiences in the city around them. Together with artists, we imagine theatre that has never been done before in places where it has never happened.”

Last season, En Garde produced The Wind and the Rain: A Story About Sunny's Bar (Drama Desk Award Nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience) by Sarah Gancher, and directed by Jared Mezzocchi at the historic Waterfront Museum in Red Hook. Vulture declared it one of the 10 Best Theater Experiences of 2024.

En Garde Arts' 2025-2026 Season opens with the world premiere of Last Call, a play with cocktails, a Pack Play (Sept 19-Oct 13, 2025), written by Obie Award winner Hansol Jung (Wolf Play). Co-directed by Jung and Dustin Wills, the intimate, immersive, site-specific production will be staged in private homes and apartments across New York City for limited audiences of 20-40 guests. Equal parts ghost story, house party, and theatrical séance, this bold new piece invites audiences into a world not unlike our own: post-crisis, mid-recovery, and craving connection.

Following their collaboration on the Drama-Desk nominated production of Sarah Gancher's The Wind and the Rain: A Story About Sunny's Bar, En Garde Arts reunites with two-time Obie Award-winning artist Jared Mezzocchi for the world premiere of 73 Seconds (Spring 2025), a solo performance piece written and performed by Mezzocchi about the familial stories we inherit, and the ones we almost never hear. Co-developed and directed by Doris Duke Artist Award-winner Aya Ogawa, 73 Seconds is an inventive and surprising new work that asks how we piece together the past, especially when it resists being remembered.

Throughout the season, En Garde Arts will present public showings and support development residencies for projects via Uncommon Voices, En Garde Arts' new work intergenerational residency and commissioning program. The projects include Samora la Perdida's Spanglish Sh!t, Taibi Magar's Tokitae, and Bill Martin's The Turtle Story, directed by Seth Bockley.

En Garde Arts is also thrilled to announce two new site-specific commissions for playwright Chisa Hutchinson and actress, playwright, and illustrator Camila Madero. 

In the Summer of 2026, En Garde Arts' Playdate series returns spotlighting NYC's most exciting emerging artists. This series highlights the work of early career artists in the backyard of a Brooklyn brownstone and a free outdoor performance series in Abolitionist Place Park in downtown Brooklyn.

More details on En Garde Arts' 2025-2026 Season follows and can be found at .

WORLD PREMIERE

Last Call, a play with cocktails

A Pack Play

Written by Hansol Jung

Co-Directed by Hansol Jung and Dustin Wills

Dramaturgy and Mixology by Lexy Leuszler

September 19 – October 13, 2025

From the artist-led collective The Pack and Obie Award-winning playwright Hansol Jung (Wolf Play) comes Last Call: a play with cocktails, an intimate, immersive, site-specific performance staged in private homes and apartments across New York City. Co-directed by Jung and Dustin Wills, Last Call features a rotating cast that includes Chris Bannow, Esco Jouléy, Dorcas Leung, Brian Quijada, Nicole Villamil, and Mitchell Winter.

Performed for audiences of just 20-40 guests at a time, Last Call, a play with cocktails unfolds behind a bar and among the crowd, where mixers are stirred, memories are shaken, and a story begins to pour. Hosts and guests blur together in a swirl of love, grief, survival, and the fictions we swallow to feel alive. Equal parts ghost story, house party, and theatrical séance, this bold new piece invites audiences into a world not unlike our own: post-crisis, mid-recovery, and craving connection.

WORLD PREMIERE 

73 Seconds

Created and Performed by Jared Mezzocchi

Developed and Directed by Aya Ogawa

Spring 2025

73 Seconds, a solo performance piece by Obie Award winning multimedia artist Jared Mezzocchi, cracks open the quiet mysteries of his family's past, asking about the stories we inherit – and the ones we never hear. What begins as a son's attempt to better understand his mother spirals into a decades-spanning excavation of memory, legacy, and the fragile line between the personal and the cosmic. Developed and directed by Doris Duke Artist Award-winner Aya Ogawa, 73 Seconds is an inventive, deeply felt work that asks how we piece together the past, especially when it resists being remembered. 

73 Seconds was developed at the Colorado New Play Festival. Its development continues in August with a presentation on August 16th at the Catskill Arts Center and a work in progress performance at Ideal Glass on August 18th.

WORKSHOPS AND WORK-IN-PROGRESS PRESENTATIONS

The Turtle Story

Written by Bill Martin

Directed Seth Bockley

The Turtle Story is a new metaphysical drama by longtime producer, playwright, and disability rights advocate Bill Martin. Presumed to be dead, a Marine returns home from Afghanistan and encounters the family he left behind. The Turtle Story ponders the impact of war, the power of love, and the mysteries of loss and grace.

SPANGLISH SH!T 

Created and Written by Samora la Perdida

Co-Composed by Josiah Handelman, Mobéy Lola Irizarry, and Matthew Zwiebel, 

Dramaturgy by Paloma Sierra

Samora la Perdida's SPANGLISH SH!T is a new bilingual brujería musical about the spiritual cost of assimilation, with book and lyrics by Samora la Perdida and music by Josiah Handelman, Mobéy Lola Irizarry,  and Matthew Zwiebel. SPANGLISH SH!T tells the story of Brujita, a trans Puerto Rican witch who leaves behind her Puerto Rican hometown for the New Jersey suburbs. But when she sacrifices her Spanish for perfect English, what she gains in popularity, she loses in magical ability.

SPANGLISH SH!T came to En Garde Arts through Playdate in 2022 and has received residencies and workshops at Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor, Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC's Ideal Glass Studios, and Antenna Cloud Farm. Upcoming residencies include the Pocantico Center and the Watermill Center. Music from SPANGLISH SH!T can be heard on PLAYBILL's Songwriter series.

Tokitae 

Created and Directed by Taibi Magar

Puppetry Design by Amanda Villalobos

Tokitae by Taibi Magar (OBIE, Is God Is, 2018), developed in consultation with the Lummi Nation, tells the story of captive orca Tokitae and the quest of the people of the Lummi Nation to return her home to the Salish Sea. Through a collaboration with award-winning puppeteer Amanda Villalobos, Magar incorporates puppetry and projection design to bring Tokitae to life.

Magar received En Garde Arts' 2024 Joan D. Firestone Award, and Tokitae will have its first workshop in the fall of 2025. 

Who Cares

Created by Camila Madero