Taibi Magar to Direct THE HALF-GOD OF RAINFALL at New York Theatre Workshop

New York Theatre Workshop has announced that Obie Award winner and NYTW Usual Suspect Taibi Magar (Help) will direct the previously announced production of The Half-God of Rainfall by Hay Festival Medal for Poetry winner Inua Ellams (Barber Shop Chronicles), part of NYTW's 2022/23 season.

Taibi Magar was recently named the Co-Artistic Director of Philadelphia Theatre Company. As a freelance director, her most recent credits are Help (The Shed) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Signature Theatre, Lortel Award). Other NY credits include Capsule by Whitney White and Peter Mark Kendall (Under the Radar Festival/The Public Theater, co-directed with Tyler Dobrowsky); Blue Ridge starring Marin Ireland and The Great Leap starring BD Wong (Atlantic Theater Company); Is God Is (Soho Rep, 2018 Obie Award); Master (The Foundry, NYT Critics Pick); and Underground Railroad Game (Ars Nova, NYT Critics Pick). She also premiered the new musicals Macbeth In Stride and We Live In Cairo at A.R.T. Boston. Regional: CTG, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Alley Theatre, The Guthrie Theater, and Seattle Repertory Theatre, among others. International: Hamburg Festival, Edinburgh Festival, Malthouse Theatre (Melbourne), and Soho Theatre (London). Other: She is the recipient of a Stephen Sondheim Fellowship, Oregon Shakespeare Festival Fellowship, Public Theater Shakespeare Fellowship, and TFANA Actors and Director Project Fellowship. Taibi is an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and a NYTW Usual Suspect. She received an Obie Award in 2018 and the SDC Breakout Award in 2019.

When Demi, the half Nigerian-mortal, half Greek-god, is angry, rain clouds gather. When he cries, rivers burst their banks. And the first time he takes a shot on a basketball court, the deities of the land wake up.

From award-winning poet and playwright Inua Ellams comes a new myth that spans continents and millennia. The Half-God of Rainfall is a contemporary epic that weaves poetry and storytelling in a majestic journey that transports us from a tiny village in South West Nigeria to an NBA arena in the United States to the hallowed halls of Mount Olympus, where the mothers, daughters and goddesses take a stand against the fragile, furious and entitled gods.

Performance schedule, casting and the full creative team will be announced at a later date.

The NYTW 2022/23 season began with american (tele)visions by Tow Playwright-in-Residence Victor I. Cazares (Pinching Pennies with Penny Marshall), directed by NYTW Usual Suspect Rubén Polendo (); and will be followed by Merrily We Roll Along, featuring music & lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, a book by George Furth, and based on the original play by George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart. Directed by Olivier Award winner Maria Friedman and choreographed by Tim Jackson, Merrily We Roll Along is presented by special arrangement with Sonia Friedman Productions, the Menier Chocolate Factory (Artistic Director, David Babani), and Patrick Catullo, and will star Jonathan Groff as Franklin, Lindsay Mendez as Mary and Daniel Radcliffe as Charley. The season will continue in 2023 with the 2019 winner of the Yale Drama Prize, How to Defend Yourself by Liliana Padilla (Born 1000 Times), co-directed by Tony Award winner and NYTW Usual Suspect Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown), Liliana Padilla and Helen Hayes Award winner Steph Paul (The Last Match), followed by Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, in a new adaptation by Pulitzer Prize finalist Clare Barron (Dance Nation, You Got Older), directed by Tony Award winner and NYTW Usual Suspect Sam Gold (Othello, Fun Home).

New York Theatre Workshop empowers visionary theatre-makers and brings their work to adventurous audiences through productions, artist workshops and educational programs. We nurture pioneering new writers alongside powerhouse playwrights, engage inimitable genre-shaping directors, and support emerging artists in the earliest days of their careers. We've mounted over 150 productions from artists whose work has shaped our very idea of what theatre can be, including Jonathan Larson's Rent; Tony Kushner's Slavs! and Homebody/Kabul; Doug Wright's Quills; Claudia Shear's Blown Sideways Through Life and Dirty Blonde; Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told and Valhalla; Martha Clarke's Vienna: Lusthaus; Will Power's The Seven and Fetch Clay, Make Man; Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, Far Away, A Number and Love and Information; Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's Aftermath; Rick Elice's Peter and the Starcatcher; Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová and Enda Walsh's Once; David Bowie and Enda Walsh's Lazarus; Dael Orlandersmith's The Gimmick and Forever; Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me; Jeremy O. Harris's Slave Play; and eight acclaimed productions directed by Ivo van Hove. NYTW's productions have received a Pulitzer Prize, 25 Tony Awards, 2 Grammy Awards and assorted Obie, Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards. NYTW is represented on Broadway with Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown developed with and directed by Rachel Chavkin.

Alongside its artistic and community engagement activities, NYTW is engaged in the essential, sustained commitment of becoming an anti-racist organization in support and affirmation of Black people, Indigenous people and People of Color in its community. In June of 2020, NYTW published its Core Values statement and initial action and accountability steps. In an effort to provide greater transparency, NYTW shares progress updates, further commitments and next steps at nytw.org/accountability.

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