KING OF THE YEES, MILES FOR MARY and More Set for Signature Theatre 26-27 Season

Signature Theatre has revealed its 2026-27 season, continuing its model of long-term artistic support for Resident Artists, across four productions. This season, the organization begins a relationship with its newest resident, Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer Prize finalist playwright and performer Eisa Davis, and continues its collaborations with Mother Russia and Cambodian Rock Band playwright Lauren Yee, inaugural Launchpad Resident Melis Aker, and ensemble company The Mad Ones. Community concerts in the organization’s Pershing Square Signature Center lobby, meanwhile, keep audiences engaged with the singular work of An Oratorio for Living Things and Animal Wisdom artist Heather Christian.

Following the acclaimed, twice-extended run of her riotous post-Soviet dark comedy Mother Russia, Signature presents Lauren Yee’s semi-autobiographical play King of the Yees (October 2026). Tony Award winner Francis Jue (Signature: Cambodian Rock Band; Broadway: Yellow Face; Off-Broadway: Tartuffe), who performed as Yee’s character’s father in San Francisco and Chicago, reprises the role for this new production at Signature. He and Lauren Yee reteam with director Joshua Kahan Brody, who staged those regional productions—making this new mounting both appropriately a family affair and an opportunity to reimagine it for a new theater and new audiences.

With King of the Yees, audiences familiar with the playwright’s playful, heightened comic dissections of political and economic systems and seismic historical shifts will find the playwright zooming in—with trademark theatrical (and meta-theatrical) flair, pop-cultural saturation, hilarity, and heart—on her own family and upbringing in San Francisco’ Chinatown. 

The season features not one, but two comedies, back-to-back: King of the Yees and Miles for Mary (February 2027), Signature’s first production from Resident Artists The Mad Ones, The Ensemble Company that creates new work through the collaboration of co-Artistic Directors Marc Bovino (writer/performer), Joe Curnutte (writer/performer), Michael Dalto (writer/performer), Stephanie Wright Thompson (writer/performer), and Lila Neugebauer (writer/director).

Miles for Mary brings audiences into Garrison, Ohio, in 1988, charting the strained preparatory discussions among faculty members for a high school charity telethon. With the same “first-rate” (The New York Times, in a Critic’s Pick review) cast (Bovino, Curnutte, Dalto, Thompson, and Amy Staats and Stacey Yen), The Mad Ones this season brings to Signature a new production of their beloved 2018 play.

Like King of the Yees, a second play this season mines family memory as it positions the playwright as a character at the center of her own work. Signature begins Eisa Davis’s residency with a play that propels audiences through the moments and people shaping an artist—and reveals how, in the midst of so many strong forces of influence, an artist also shapes herself. Angela’s Mixtape (May 2027) moves impressionistically through of her youth—fragmentarily structured to the rhythms and lyricism of a DJ set—through the 70s to the 90s, with the legendary figure of activist Angela Davis as her aunt. Along the way, the play captures the culture, music, and contexts of American capitalism, imperialism, and racism Davis’s radical upbringing was formed around and against.

Davis is the second Resident Artist announced by Signature since Shooltz stepped into the role of Artistic Director—following Heather Christian, another artist approaching theater-making through music and performance as well as writing. 

Signature teams with WP Theatre to present Launchpad Resident Melis Aker’s Fish in association with New Light Theater Project with consulting producer Noor Theater Company, September 26-October 25 at WP Theater. If Angela’s Mixtape and Miles for Mary capture the feeling of culture’s last analog moments, Fish is rooted firmly in a society transformed by the digital. Aker’s funny, tender, and nail-bitingly tense play follows a teenage girl from a Turkish immigrant family in London who, with her Best Friend, searches for answers to her brother’s disappearance by catfishing ISIS.

The co-production follows developmental presentations of Fish by Signature in Fall 2024, and will be performed at WP Theatre. Emily Shooltz says, “Working with WP, Noor, and New Light in this four-way collaboration speaks to how theaters are finding ways to come together at this moment, each bringing something to the table so we can best serve the art. We’re collectively wrapping our arms around and supporting this production, which has an intimacy and delicacy that will play beautifully in WP’s theater.”

In addition to its productions, Signature will activate the Pershing Square Signature Center’s vast and inviting lobby this season with various events, including community concerts of Heather Christian’s acclaimed TERCE: A Practical Breviary, November 2026. The free and open-to-the-public presentations will be directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, who stages Christian’s Animal Wisdom as the conclusion of the 2025-26 season (May 5-June 14) and directed the world premiere production of Terce at Brooklyn’s The Space at Irondale in 2024. The organization this season also continues its new music series Signature Jazz, curated by Solomon Gottfried, and celebrating innovative jazz music in an intimate, relaxed Monday evening setting in the Center lobby. Free community programming will also include moderated conversations between resident artists (“Artists on Artists”), networking opportunities for early career theater makers, and more.

Fish

By Melis Aker
September 26-October 25
At WP Theater

2016, London. Seventeen-year-old Karya is navigating her brother’s unresolved disappearance. When her mother’s outrageous theory about his whereabouts starts to gain traction, Karya decides to put it to the test. With her Best Friend, she devises a twisted online experiment, setting a hook in the darkest corners of the internet. But what begins as a search for answers quickly spirals into something more sinister than she ever expected. By turns sharp, tensely funny, and tender, Fish is a darkly comedic coming-of-age story about grief, girlhood and games that go too far.

King of the Yees

By Lauren Yee
Directed by Joshua Kahan Brody
October 2026

For nearly twenty years, Larry Yee has been the heart and soul of the Yee Fung Toy Family Association, a fraternal organization in San Francisco’s iconic Chinatown. But to his daughter Lauren, a playwright living in New York, the association is an obsolete relic of a vanishing world. When Larry suddenly disappears, Lauren sets off on a wild quest to find him, embarking on a surreal, magical journey through the history and myths of her own lineage. King of the Yees is a hilarious and heartfelt "kind of true" story by Signature resident artist Lauren Yee, who turns her incisive comedic eye on what we inherit and what it means to truly be a Yee. 

Miles for Mary

By The Mad Ones
February 2027

It's 1988 in Ohio. The Garrison High Planning Committee is determined to make their annual telethon the best one yet. But as they navigate a strained democratic process, the pressure to DO MORE begins to crack their professional veneer. This sharply observed comedy by and featuring Signature resident artists The Mad Ones returns in an all-new staging, capturing the quiet agony and absurdity of trying to change the world from a linoleum-floored faculty lounge.

Angela’s Mixtape

By Eisa Davis
May 2027

What’s it like to grow up in the shadow of a shero? Signature resident artist Eisa Davis pens a love letter to her radical upbringing in a family of proud activists, including her mother and her legendary aunt, Angela Y. Davis. Set on the dividing line between Oakland and Berkeley, California and moving to the rhythm of her childhood’s hip-hop, soul, pop and classical soundtrack, this memory- and time-shifting piece is a revealing portrait of a young artist in search of her own beat.

TERCE: A Practical Breviary

By Heather Christian
Directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant
Community Concert
November 2026