The Civilians Reveals 16th Annual R&D Group & 2025/26 Next Forever Commissions
The season will feature the world premiere of Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, and more.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Oct. 17, 2025
The Civilians has revealed its 25th anniversary season. In addition to the world premiere of Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, in a co-production with The Vineyard Theatre, The Civilians will welcome the newest members of its R&D Group, as well as its third round of commissions for The Next Forever, a one of a kind partnership with Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute and Lewis Center for the Arts that creates new stories for a changing planet.
Now entering its 16th season, The R&D Group is comprised of playwrights, composers, and directors who work together as a writing group for nine months to develop new plays and musicals. The season culminates in Findings, a works-in-progress reading series, anticipated to take place in June 2026. The artists were selected from a competitive application process that included nearly 200 submissions.
The members of The Civilians’ 2025-26 R&D Group are Jason Aguirre, Andromache Chalfant, HyoJeong Choi, Nazareth Hassan, Jesse Jae Hoon, Jeanine Oleson, and Adam J. Rineer.
Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute and Lewis Center for the Arts and The Civilians announce the 2025-26 artists of their collaborative initiative, The Next Forever, playwright Gloria Majule and the performance company Lightning Rod Special. The Next Forever is a partnership that seeks to create new stories for a changing planet, exploring how dynamic storytelling can engage vital environmental subjects and provide the vision and inspiration society needs to navigate the challenges of our planet’s future — the “next forever.” The commissioned artists will spend time on the Princeton University campus as guest artists, engage with faculty and students across disciplines, and participate in an ongoing series of public events and performances over the course of a year-long residency and two-year commissioning agreement. They join previously commissioned artists Kareem Fahmy, AriDy Nox, Kate Douglas and Kate Tarker, who are continuing to develop the works they began during their residencies from the last two years.
Later this month, The Civilians and The Vineyard Theatre will co-produce The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, written by Anne Washburn and directed by Steve Cosson. Performances on October 23, 2025 at The Vineyard Theatre for a limited run through November 30. Tickets begin at $37.80 and are on sale now at www.vineyardtheatre.org.
The 2025-26 R&D Group projects are as follows:
Disco Demo
By Composer & Lyricist Adam J. Rineer and Librettist & Director Jason Aguirre
On July 12, 1979, Chicago erupted in what some call “the day disco died”. At Comiskey Park, the “Disco Sucks” movement’s record torching publicity stunt turned into a riot, destroying thousands of disco records. Just a few blocks away, in a fictional South Side discotheque, a group of regulars dance, celebrate, and fight to survive as the city’s cultural fabric is torn open. Disco Demo is an interview-based musical that shifts the spotlight from the spectacle to the people who lived it. Drawn directly from the voices of patrons, DJs, and club owners, it’s part oral history and part found-text theatre, sharing a portrait of the Black, Brown, and queer Chicagoans who found solace in a genre that championed joy and liberation.
January in New York
January in New York is about the line between freedom and responsibility and the endurance of a marriage. Generated through a series of interviews with the writer’s own parents, this multimedia piece traces the real couple’s relationship during a period of ideological certitude. Impossible expectations reveal deep wounds and regrets that give way to dignity and the resilience of the individual. With music composed by Robert M. Johanson, films by M Sharkey and Stepan Liubimov and performances by Marianne Rendón and Robert M. Johanson.
Jumpers
By HyoJeong Choi
Jumpers is a theatrical investigation of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster told through the overlooked lives of contract workers cleaning the site. At its center is Astro Girl—a cartoonish, trickster narrator who disrupts the action with unreliable commentary and shifting genres. Blending documentary and absurdity, the play exposes the human cost of technological progress while questioning how disasters that are ongoing, politicized, and obscured can ever be fully represented.
Untitled Statelessness Project
By Nazareth Hassan
A play about statelessness that examines the potential for the American identity to shift through displacement, from the lens of a speculative future where Americans are forced to be refugees. How does Americanness hold up psychologically outside of its context? How will our language(s) shift under duress? How are borders, nations, and alliances stages for the performance of self within the context of a collective tribal or national identity? When the collective identity of nationality is stripped, what parts of the self are destroyed?
Saved, Part 2: Thanksgiving
By Jesse Jae Hoon (윤재훈)
Saved, Part 2: Thanksgiving is the second play in a two-part drama about the South Korean adoption industry, from its Cold War origins to its transformation into a lucrative business empire built by systemic fraud and negligence. Three epic stories spanning six decades across Oregon, Washington DC, Vermont, Seoul, and Jeju Island, SAVED explores what happens when we kill the parents and raise the children. Saved, Part 1: The Girl and the Sky introduces the origins of industrialized adoption – Thanksgiving dives into the consequences.
Untitled Tsunami Project
By Jeanine Oleson
At some unknown point, the geological activity in the Cascadia Subduction Zone of the Pacific Northwest will trigger large tsunamis that will devastate the region. The impact on vulnerable communities will be staggering and longer-term issues with nuclear and toxic afterlives will be a certainty. This experimental performance responds to this set of circumstances using sound/music that relates to geological activity, language pulled from climate/geosciences research, oral histories and bureaucratic red tape.
Led by The Civilians’ Resident Dramaturg Phoebe Corde, R&D Group artists share work as it develops, discuss their creative processes, and provide a community of support for one another. Each project develops according to its unique methods of creative inquiry, offering new approaches to the idea of “investigative theater.” Methods may include interviews, community engagement, research, or other experimental methods of inquiry. The artists will meet twice a month.
The 2025-26 Next Forever Commissions are as follows:
Untitled
By Gloria Majule
In a post-apocalyptic world where Africa is the only surviving continent, a team of African scientists develop a time machine to travel back in time and warn humanity of the impending doom that lies ahead. Their mission is to change the course of history—or, at the very least, delay the devastation and give humanity a fighting chance.
Untitled Climate Change Sex Farce
Untitled Climate Change Sex Farce sets a rollicking farce on the eve of the wedding of two wealthy young Americans at a seaside resort. As the high-octane human drama unfolds—with secret lovers cropping up like wildfires, and last-minute pleas to break off the wedding shaking the set like earthquakes—the drama of the natural world threatens the proceedings indoors with more and more urgency. At the play's conclusion, while the characters remain wilfully ignorant to the looming climate-crisis, the elements overtake the resort, and everyone dies. Using Lightning Rod Special’s unique brand of acerbic political satire,U.C.C.S.F.unveils the absurdity of humanity's self-obsession and its persistent disregard for mounting environmental catastrophe.
The Next Forever provides forward-thinking artists unparalleled access to a cross-disciplinary range of knowledge and ideas—of scientists, conservation psychologists, historians, policy and communications experts, and others. The intention of The Next Forever is to support artists as they pursue rigorous inquiry into their subject matter alongside some of Princeton University’s greatest thinkers.
This multifaceted initiative comprises a competitive commission-and-residency program for theater makers, an ongoing series of public events and performances, and an undergraduate class on narrative and the environment. It will fund two commissions of theatrical work that offer new visions for how we relate to the world around us. Additionally, The Next Forever provides artists with the opportunity to engage over a semester with Princeton faculty working in relevant fields.
As part of The Next Forever, two commissions are awarded annually to theater makers to create original works that engage environmental subject matter. The initiative also provides commissioned artists with the opportunity to engage with Princeton faculty, researchers, and students working in fields relevant to their projects. Following the completion of the commission, further development of the new work with The Civilians is possible.
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