Playwrights Horizons to Present New York Premiere of Milo Cramer's SCHOOL PICTURES

Playwrights Horizons will present the New York premiere of School Pictures, written and performed by Milo Cramer. After debuting at the Wilma in Philadelphia, School Pictures makes its New York premiere, directed again by the Wilma's Lead Artistic Director, Morgan Green. Gathering observations from their time tutoring into a collection of witty, playful, and candid fictional song-poem portraits of ten students fighting to get into competitive New York City schools, Cramer builds School Pictures to a sweeping meditation on inequality, learning, parenting, and the cruelty of puberty. Performances take place November 8 - December 3 in Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater. The production opens on November 20.

 

School Pictures is part of a repertory series of innovative solo works performed by their creators this season at Playwrights Horizons. The series also includes the Off-Broadway premiere of Alexandra Tatarsky's Sad Boys in Harpy Land, directed by Iris McCloughan (November 2 – 26, opening November 13), and Ikechukwu Ufomadu's Amusements, directed by Nemuna Ceesay (November 8 – December 3, opening November 20). The 2023-24 season's three writer-performed solo works all share the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. Each of these events features the playwright as the performer, reminding us of the essential components of drama: the storyteller and the audience. This trio of plays is a new variation on the organization's programming templates, and its performances are offered at a lower price point.

 

Through its portraits of ten kids, School Pictures' narrative also becomes a character study of a tutor: someone with a unique glimpse into the intimate lives of privileged New Yorkers, coming to understand the insidious elements of a job that initially seemed innocuous. As a high-level tutor of kids preparing for tests for entry into New York's elite public high schools, Cramer at first approached the job at surface level: assuming they were helping kids learn while making money to live in New York and sustain their artistry. As they became more familiar with the demands of New York elite public schooling and were fleetingly immersed in the domestic environments of strangers with ambitious paths laid out for their uncertain children, this morphed into an understanding of being a cog in a system perpetuating educational segregation.

 

Cramer describes the impetus to turn these experiences into performance: “You enter these wildly different homes—and mom and dad are maybe getting drunk, or getting divorced, or watching TV in the next room—and you only have an hour. And they're paying an unconscionable amount, trying to buy something that cannot be bought: a happy future for their family. The kid, meanwhile, is so depressed — struggling with their shame, their bodies, being cyberbullied, and meanwhile they have some impossible humanities assignment. Between being enmeshed in this exclusionary system, parents' expectations, alienated children, and then your own, if you're me, incompetence and secret agenda to make everyone an artist, 10,000 fascinating dramatic situations unfolded.”

 

They add, of their reason for turning this material into a solo work, delivered by the tutor themselves, “Playwriting can be so creepy in its way! There's a puppeteering quality to it: you're putting words in people's mouths, and making them act it out. For this piece, I really wanted to be transparent about these being my observations—albeit fictionalized—and perceptions, and me talking. Even though I'm representing these kids, I wanted to do so in a very gentle way. I hope audiences get a sense from these portraits that even with the most obnoxious child, or the most eerily perfect child, or the most awkward child, you cannot help but love them and feel for what they're going through.”

 

Says Adam Greenfield, “The three productions running in repertory share the commonality of ‘solo performance' but are otherwise so spectacularly different: in Alex's Sad Boys, characters explode from the performer in ways as laugh-out-loud funny as they are disquieting; Milo Cramer's work, like Tatarsky's, explores questions of complicity and our role in the systems around us, with keen, trenchant observation rendered through the sweet simplicity of ditties we might learn in school; Ikechukwu Ufomadu unexpectedly collapses bone-dryness and whimsy into an evening of theatrical and hilarious anti-theatrics and anti-humor. With these works, we're seeking to expand the range of artists and works that audiences expect to see at Playwrights Horizons. It's our mission to support and advance playwrights, and to do so means considering fully what the word ‘playwright' means.  In these works, we see the vast range of possibility that exists between a single performer onstage, the audience, and all the unpredictable things they can do with the space between them.”

 

About Milo Cramer

Milo Cramer's (they/them) audio play BOY FACTORY can be heard on Playwrights Horizons: Soundstage (“Best theater of 2020… delightfully strange, horribly uncomfortable” - Joey Simms, Transitions). Other works include Cute Activist at The Bushwick Starr (“a brilliant match of material and theater… a fable for our times” - The New York Times), and Minor Character: Six Translations of Uncle Vanya at the Same Time (“delightful… a spring-green forum on youth's discontents” - Helen Shaw, The Village Voice), created with New Saloon and seen at The Public Theater's Under The Radar Festival. Milo's solo musical School Pictures premiered at The Wilma in Philadelphia and was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Relentless Award. Milo is a Macdowell Fellow, an MFA Candidate at UCSD, and commissioned by Clubbed Thumb and Playwrights Horizons.

About Morgan Green

 

Morgan Green directs plays, films, podcasts, and dinnertime. Her work celebrates goofiness, visual poetry, and surprise. Green was a Co-founder of the award-winning theater company, New Saloon (Minor Character at The Public Theater, Cute Activist at The Bushwick Starr) and is currently a Co-Artistic Director at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where she directed the Pulitzer Prize winning filmed production of Fat Ham by James Ijames, and Barrymore nominated School Pictures, by Milo Cramer. Other credits include The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe (West Coast Premiere, Marin Theater Company), The Music Man by Meredith Wilson, Far Away by Caryl Churchill (The Sharon Playhouse), and BOY FACTORY by Milo Cramer (Playwrights Horizons Soundstage).

Ticketing Information

Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased here. 

 

About Playwrights Horizons

 

Playwrights Horizons is a writer's theater dedicated to the development of contemporary American Playwrights, and to the production of innovative new work. In a city rich with cultural offerings, Playwrights Horizons' 52-year-old mission is unique among theaters of its size; the organization has distinguished itself by a steadfast commitment to centering and advancing the voice of the playwright. It's a mission that is always timely, and one that's necessary in the ongoing evolution of theater in this country.

 

Playwrights Horizons believes that playwrights are the great storytellers of our time, offering essential contributions to civic discourse and illuminating life's greatest paradoxes. And they believe in the singularity of a writer's voice, valuing the broad, eclectic spectrum and diversity of American writers. At Playwrights Horizons, writers are supported in every stage of their growth through commissions (engaging several of today's most imaginative playwrights each year), New Works Lab, Soundstage audio program, and Almanac, the organization's literary magazine.

 

Playwrights Horizons presents a season of productions annually on their two stages, each of which is a world, American, or New York premiere. Much like Playwrights Horizons' work, their audience is risk-taking and adventurous; and the organization is committed to strengthening their engagement and feeding their curiosity through all of its programming, onsite and online.

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