Santino Fontana, Celia Keenan-Bolger & More to Take Part in KEEN ON NEW WORK Reading Series

Keen Company has announced details for Keen On New Work, a reading series featuring works-in-progress by 2022 Keen Playwrights Lab writers Kristoffer Diaz, Sarah Schulman, and Anna Ziegler.

Launched in October of 2013, The Keen Playwrights Lab brings together three playwrights in mid-career to develop new work through an environment of camaraderie and support. Over the course of a year, each playwright develops a new full-length play inspired by Keen's mission of creating stories that celebrate the complexities of hope and the joys of connection. Readings are FREE and open to the public, however, space is limited and reservations at www.keencompany.org/playlabreadings are required. All readings take place at the ART/NY Conference Room (520 8th Ave, Manhattan).

"I am thrilled to announce the details for this year's Playwrights Lab readings, the first in-person sharing from our Lab since the pandemic," said Keen's Artistic Director Jonathan Silverstein. "It has been an honor to be in the room with these three exceptional and seasoned artists throughout the year, under the leadership of Keen's Director of New Work, Jeremy Stoller. Anna, Kris, and Sarah are all unique voices, yet they share a common sense of compassion and a deep understanding of the world we live in, while also reveling in the joy of the human condition. I am eager to showcase their work from the past year with our community."

Keen On New Work Schedule & Details

December 2nd at 3pm

Antigones

by Anna Ziegler

Directed by Tyne Rafaeli

Featuring Santino Fontana, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Marianne Rendón, Armando Riesco

Women's bodies and the body politic collide in this reimagining of the classic drama. In Sophocles's Antigone, a woman defies the law to honor a loved one; in Ziegler's arresting retelling, Antigone battles the powers-that-be on more personal grounds. A contemporary adaptation for the #metoo and post-Roe moment, this is an Antigone that asks how we can possibly fix the world if we don't even own our own bodies.

December 12th at 3pm

Things With Friends

Written and directed by Kristoffer Diaz

Burt and Adele are hosting a dinner party. Their friends are kind of awful. The city is collapsing around them. The steak, however, is fantastic, and the sweet potatoes are on their way. A dark riff on the "sitting on fancy couches drinking expensive wine and eventually revealing deeply hidden secrets" genre of drama.

January 9th at 3pm

Free Ali! Free Bob!

by Sarah Schulman

Every town has a gay art clique that rules with an iron glove, and Bloorsville is no exception. But when charismatic ringleader Bob gets arrested and detained overseas, the hierarchy explodes. A biting comedy about the confrontation of local and global politics.

About the Keen Playwrights Lab

Each year, the Keen Playwrights Lab brings together three mid-career playwrights to develop new full-length plays that uphold Keen's mission to provoke identification, reflection, and emotional connection.

Launched in 2013 by founding Director of New Work Mark Armstrong and current Artistic Director Jonathan Silverstein, the Lab's mission is two-fold: to make Keen a home for new plays that speak deeply to our mission and vibrantly to the present moment; and to help address the dearth of development support for American Playwrights who have evolved out of early-career status into the trenches of mid-career.

Under the leadership of Jeremy Stoller, Keen Company's current Director of New Work, the writers meet monthly to share, discuss, and develop work with their peers in a relaxed and supportive environment. The Playwrights Lab culminates with readings of these works in progress, attended by the Keen community, the theater industry, and the general public.

When It's You by Courtney Baron was developed in the Keen Playwrights Lab and then premiered on our mainstage in 2017. Kenny Finkle's eight-part audio play with music 1993, which started in Keen's 2015 Playwrights Lab and developed with an NEA grant, premiered as part of Keen's 2020-2021 Hear/Now Season of Audio Theater. Karen Hartman's New Golden Age was produced by Primary Stages as part of 59E59's 2022 VOLT festival, following its development in the 2020 Keen Playwrights Lab.

More information at http://www.keencompany.org/playlab.

About the Playwrights

Kristoffer Diaz

is a playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and educator. His play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Other full-length titles include Welcome to Arroyo's, Reggie Hoops, Hercules, and The Unfortunates. His work has been produced, commissioned, and developed at The Public Theater, Dallas Theater Center, Geffen Playhouse, ACT, Center Theatre Group, The Goodman, Second Stage, Victory Gardens, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, among many others. Awards include the Guggenheim, Jerome, Van Lier, NYFA, and Gail Merrifield Papp Fellowships; New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award; Lucille Lortel, Equity Jeff, and OBIE Awards; and the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant, among others. As a screenwriter, Kristoffer has developed original television pilots for HBO and FX, written for the first season of Netflix's GLOW, and adapted the musical Rent for FOX. Kristoffer teaches playwriting at New York University. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a member of its Board of Directors, and a current officer of the Dramatists Guild Council.

Sarah Schulman

is a playwright, novelist, nonfiction writer, screenwriter and AIDS historian. She is the author of 20 novels, nonfiction books, and published plays. A Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting, she has had three productions: Carson McCullers (Playwrights Horizons/The Women's Project, director Marion McClinton), Manic Flight Reaction (Playwrights Horizons, director Trip Cullman, w/ Deirdre O'Connell) and a theatrical adaptation of IB Singer's Enemies, A Love Story (Wilma, director Jiri Ziska, w/ Morgan Spector). Her plays have had workshops and readings at The La Jolla Playhouse, The Cleveland Playhouse, The Goodman, The Vineyard, Rattlestick, New York Theater Workshop, ART, Trinity Rep, The Roundabout, The Sundance Theater Lab. Recent Developments: Sarah's play The Lady Hamlet had a joyous and rollicking run at The Provincetown Theater directed by David Drake, starring Jennifer Van Dyck. Her play Roe Versus Wade: A Mirror Is Not A Window will have a developmental reading at Northwestern University, directed by Lisa Peterson and dramaturged by Tanya Palmer, Shimmer - a new musical with composer Anthony Davis and lyricist Michael Korie is being workshopped at Yale this Spring.

Anna Ziegler

has written the plays Actually (produced at Manhattan Theatre Club, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Geffen Playhouse, London's Trafalgar Studios and more; L.A. Ovation Award winner for Playwriting for an Original Play), the widely produced Photograph 51 (directed on the West End by Michael Grandage and starring Nicole Kidman; WhatsOnStage Award for Best New Play; Chicago Tribune's #1 play of 2019 and a "Best of the Year" play in The Washington Post and UK's The Telegraph), Boy (Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award nominee), The Wanderers (upcoming at The Roundabout, City Theatre and The Ernst Deutsch Theatre (Hamburg); previously produced at The Old Globe; Theater J; Gesher Theater (Israel); Craig Noel Award winner for Outstanding New Play), The Last Match (Roundabout Theatre Company; The Old Globe; Writers' Theatre; City Theatre), and A Delicate Ship (New York Times Critic's Pick). She holds commissions from, among others, Roundabout Theatre Company, Second Stage Theatre and Grove/Whitman. Oberon/Bloomsbury Books has published a collection of her work entitled Anna Ziegler: Plays One; a new collection, Plays Two, is forthcoming. Recent: Photograph 51 at Melbourne Theatre Company and Ensemble Theatre (Sydney); The Great Moment at Seattle Rep (world premiere); Antigones at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference; The Janeiad at Cape Cod Theatre Project and Ojai Playwrights Conference. She is developing television and movie projects with Paramount, Defiant by Nature and Leviathan Productions. Photograph 51 is available on Audible and in Bloomsbury's Modern Classics series. More at annabziegler.net.

About Keen Company

Keen Company is a Drama Desk and Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway company creating theater that connects. In intimate productions of plays and musicals, we celebrate the complexities of hope and the joys of the human condition. Keen also fosters mid-career playwrights through our Keen Playwrights Lab and mentors students from all five boroughs of NYC through our Keen Teens education program. In everything we do, Keen Company thrives through our welcoming ethos and community commitments.

More information at https://www.keencompany.org/