World Premieres by Raja Feather Kelly, Becca Blackwell & More Set for Soho Rep 2023-24 Season

Soho Rep has revealed its 2023–24 season, curated by outgoing Soho Rep Directors Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides. The season’s productions culminate Soho Rep’s ongoing support of the artists creating them: Becca Blackwell and Shayok Misha Chowdhury were both in the inaugural cohort (2020-21) of Soho Rep Project Number One, which brings artists on as salaried staff members, and Raja Feather Kelly choreographed Soho Rep’s world premiere production Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, directed by Sarah Benson, and was once a member of Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab. The season includes presentations by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA)of Soho Rep & NAATCO’s National Partnership Project’s critically acclaimed, award-winning production of Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Public Obscenities, following a world premiere at Soho Rep in 2023. 

Soho Rep’s 2023-24 productions season exemplify what Time Out New York, naming Soho Rep the “Best Theater in NYC” in the magazine’s 2021 Best of the City Awards, said of the organization: “Soho Rep isn’t the last word in downtown experimental theater: Better than that, it’s often one of the first words, championing major voices at key points in their careers [and presenting today’s] bravest, boldest, and wildest theater.” In the coming Soho Rep season, Blackwell, Chowdhury, and Kelly—all three queer artists with wide-ranging aesthetics—ambitiously push their artistic practices into new formal and thematic territories.

Soho Rep Director Cynthia Flowers says, “This season is the last one planned by my beloved partners, Meropi Peponides and Sarah Benson, and it exemplifies the beautiful ways in which their programming brought to life Soho Rep’s mission of providing meaningful opportunities for radical theatermakers at critical junctures in their artistic practices. Becca is one of downtown theater’s most beloved actors and creators, and Snatch Adams will represent the longest, most in-depth production to date of their original work. Raja has been choreographing, devising, and directing to acclaim since 2005, and through his deeply personal The Fires, audiences will get to know him as a playwright for the first time. To my knowledge, Public Obscenities was the first bilingual Bangla/English play to be produced Off Broadway, and it gives me huge hope for the field that it is now transferring to TFANA and Woolly Mammoth, where tens of thousands more audience members than we could ever accommodate at our theater will have the chance to see it. Shortly, we'll be announcing two new artistic leaders of Soho Rep, and I know they are just as excited to dive into this incredible season as we are.”

Actor and writer Becca Blackwell (they/them; Is This a Room, Sort Of, High Maintenance) returns to Soho Rep for the world premiere of Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It's That Time of the Month, directed by longtime collaborator Jess Barbagallo (he/him), with an immersive production design by Greg Corbino (he/him), and presented in association with TheBushwick Starr. The work is a hilarious queer spectacle that takes the form of an antic-filled talk show, with a series of special guests, co-hosted by Snatch Adams (played by Blackwell), a six-foot tall vagina who has lost her job at Planned Parenthood, and recently me too’ed comic Tainty McCracken (played by Amanda Duarte (she/her)). 

Says Peponides, “Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken will satisfy anyone who goes nuts for excessive fake blood, sequins on anything (or, everything), and exceptional gross-out humor. But it is also deeply subversive. It asks meaningful questions about the body; how we discuss (or don’t) our bodily functions, needs, and desires; and what it means to reject the shame we are taught to have around all of it.” Noel Allain, co-founder and artistic director of The Bushwick Starr, says, “We're so happy to have this opportunity to partner with Soho Rep, a theater we've loved and admired for years and in support of Becca Blackwell, an artist who we've been huge fans of for forever and who has brilliantly graced the Starr's stage in years past. This project feels like a perfect match where our combined appetites for daring, bonkers, groundbreaking work can manifest around such an exciting, boundary pushing artist. It's one of those moments when it all just feels so right. All the stars aligned. Soho Rep is the kind of theater that feels about as close to being home as we can get while we build our new theater, which is a comfort and a joy.”

Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It's That Time of the Month continues Soho Rep’s relationship with Blackwell, who was part of the first cohort of artists in Soho Rep’s Project Number One and, previously, a performer in Soho Rep’s world premiere production of Richard Maxwell’s Samara, directed by Sarah Benson, in 2017. It represents a major milestone in Blackwell’s singular career: having appeared in other artists’ work and written and performed solo shows, Blackwell now takes the lead creative role in imagining a work from the ground up and situating it in a fully designed and embodied world. 

Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s (he/him) bilingual play Public Obscenities, commissioned by Soho Rep and the NAATCO National Partnership Project and produced by them this year, garnered critical praise including a New York Times Critic’s Pick review and accolades including the Ensemble Award at the 2023 Drama Desk Awards. Written and performed in both Bangla and English, the play explores the pleasures and pitfalls of living in translation as it follows a queer studies PhD student returning to his family home in Kolkata with his Black American boyfriend. The production moves to two prestigious theaters in the season ahead: Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (November/December 2023) and Theatre for a New Audience (January/February 2024), where Soho Rep’s world premiere productions of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview had encore presentations, in 2015 and 2019, respectively. The Woolly Mammoth and TFANA engagements of Public Obscenities follow MCC’s highly successful presentation of the Soho Rep / Ma-Yi Theater Company production of Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play, directed by Dustin Wills, earlier this year.

Benson says, “In a theater field that is becoming increasingly provisional, even in a global center like New York City, it is thrilling that Public Obscenities will have an extended life and be seen by thousands more New Yorkers and residents of the Washington D.C. vicinity.” Mia Katigbak, co-founder and actor-manager of NAATCO,  adds, "Our rallying cry for the NAATCO National Partnership Project (NNPP) is 'In partnership, we can change the world!' Big leap of ambition, but achievable with significant steps. Misha's Public Obscenities, our glorious partnership project with Soho Rep, will now have a larger audience to experience this remarkable play. A fire is lit, we and our partners fan the flames, and we hope for a bright blaze that will illuminate the multifaceted world we live in and shed light on the intricacies of life that we all share." 

Woolly Mammoth artistic director Maria Goyanes says, “I cannot wait to share such an exceptional achievement as Public Obscenities with audiences in our nation’s capital, especially given that Soho Rep’s programming has long been a beacon and inspiration for our work at Woolly Mammoth.” Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience, remarks, “Theatre for a New Audience produces Shakespeare alongside other authors, past and present. Presenting Soho Rep’s extraordinary productions of Jackie Siblies Drury’s Fairview and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon in dialogue with TFANA’s productions was enlivening and enlightening. We’re thrilled to be co-producing with Woolly Mammoth the Soho Rep and NAATCO National Partnership Project production of writer-director Shayok Misha Chowdbury’s Public Obscenities and giving new audiences the opportunity to experience this celebrated play and production.”

Soho Rep’s 2023-24 season concludes with Raja Feather Kelly’s (he/him; Fairview, A Strange Loop) The Fires, commissioned by the organization. The work is the latest bold evolution in Kelly’s career. When he first came to Soho Rep, as a member of its Writer Director Lab, in 2017, he had garnered acclaim as a choreographer and dancer, and as a creator of works for his dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory. Soon after, he choreographed Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Fairview (2018) at Soho Rep, and went on to choreograph Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning musical A Strange Loop (2019), among other works. He made his Off Broadway directing debut with the Second Stage production of Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die (2020). The Fires marks his Off Broadway playwriting debut.

Set in a Brooklyn railroad apartment, in 1971, 1998, and 2021, The Fires tells the story of three men trying to understand love: what it means, where to find  it, and how to experience it. In keeping with Soho Rep’s history of programming “big plays in a small room,” The Fires will feature a company of eight actors and original music. Kelly began writing The Fires after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Eddie Glaude’s Begin Again in quick succession and an attempt to be in conversation with their lineage. Peponides explains, “The Fires reaches back through decades of Black queer discourse to make something that is wholly of the moment. I cannot wait for audiences to experience Raja’s unique voice as a playwright.”

Soho Rep’s 2023-24 season begins with three presentations from its Writer Director Lab, a beacon in the city for formally inventive theater, co-chaired by playwrights William Burke and Jackie Sibblies Drury. Through the indispensable program, the organization supports new work in development by collaborative teams of theater-makers. The Fall 2023 presentations include Nkenna Akunna & Nana Dakin’s Woo Woo Child (September 15 & 16), Ran Xia & Risa Puno’s Unresolved Rage Game (September 23), and Carolina Đỗ & Annie Jin Wang’s Untitled Seagull Project (September 29 & 30). Admission for all is free. 

SOHO REP 2023-24 WORKS AND ARTISTS

Fall 2023 Writer Director Lab Presentations

Nkenna Akunna & Nana Dakin

Woo Woo Child

September 15 & 16

Woo Woo Child follows a community of New York City artists at the precipice of new beginnings. Its present is the night of Valeria’s final performance. The group scenes take place in an upscale restaurant’s basement. With characters taking on tarot archetype qualities, the play explores fate, messy power, and narrative-by-accumulation.  

Nkenna Akunna (she/her) is an Igbo playwright, performer and lecturer from London whose work primarily explores friendship, time, work, and power. She is a member of the 2023/24 Ars Nova Play Group and a recipient of an MTC Sloan commission. She was a 2021 Playwriting Fellow at Sewanee Writers’ Conference, 2022/23 DGF finalist, 2023 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence, and is a recent MacDowell Fellow. She has a BA in Economics and African Diaspora Studies from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Playwriting from Brown University, where she was recipient of the Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship. Akunna is also co-director at Skin Deep, a collective that makes space for Black creatives and creatives of color through cultural production. 

Nana Dakin (she/her) is a queer Thai American director of new work, classics and devised performance based in NYC. Her work pursues social equity by examining the way culture is constructed and unsettling dormant biases. Upcoming: The Chinese Lady (Everyman Theatre). Recent: Again (Theater Mu), Eurydice (American Shakespeare Company), Mammelephant (Superhero Clubhouse/122CC), Lost Coast (The Playwrights Realm INK’D Festival), Sorry/Not Sorry (Ars Nova ANT Fest), Love Letter to a Seed (Clubbed Thumb Winterworks), White Pearl (Royal Court Theatre), and Richard III (Lenfest Center for the Arts). Dakin is an alum of the NYTW 2050 Directing Fellowship, Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellowship, and Civilians R&D Group. She is a core member of B-Floor Theatre, Thailand’s most highly awarded theater company, and of Superhero Clubhouse, a company that creates theater to enact climate and environmental justice. Dakin is also the Board President of the Thai Theatre Foundation. MFA Theatre Directing: Columbia University. 

Ran Xia & Risa Puno

Unresolved Rage Game

September 23

Unresolved Rage Game is a theatrical experience about the creation of a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) designed as a tool for Asian femmes to access and express rage. This presentation encapsulates our creative process while aiming to empower individuals with similar cultural backgrounds to openly explore and articulate their emotions.

Ran Xia (she/her) is a Shanghai-born, Brooklyn-based, playwright, director, audiogremlin, and ornithophile. Member of WP Lab (2022 - 2024); Beatrice Terry Resident at the Drama League (2021/22); Chava the Giant and the Oldest Bird at Rattlestick Global Form Festival. Resident Director at the Tank, where she directed and composed for the film adaptation of Prometheus Bound (inaugural Artist of the Year 2019, In Blue, Tallest Man in the World, etc.); Guest director ar Barnard (Orlando, fall 2021), Montclair State (Randi & Roxanne), Commissioned playwright at Vanderbilt University (To Stab a Butterfly Through the Heart); Usual suspect at Exquisite Corpse Co (Sound Design for the NYT critics' pick Zoetrope, audio installation for Memory House: Echo, and many more); audio producer at Black Revolutionary Media. Playwright/Director for the theatrical portion of Risa Puno's The Privilege of Escape with Creative Time. Assistant/Associate credit include: Grey House on Broadway, The Far Country & The Great Leap at The Atlantic, Queen at Long Wharf, Refrigerated Dreams at Joe's Pub, etc. She's also designed sound for productions at LIU Brooklyn, John Jay College, Theater Lab, and more. Ran is beyond grateful for this creative journey at Soho Rep. 

Risa Puno (she/her) is a NYC-based sculpture and installation artist who uses interactivity and play to understand how we relate to one another. She has exhibited with national and international organizations, including: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Onassis USA, El Museo del Barrio, NYC Dept. of Parks and Recreation, New Children’s Museum in San Diego, CA, and Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland. Puno is the recipient of multiple awards and residencies, including FIGMENT’s first ever Interactive Artist of the Year. She was selected by Creative Time as their inaugural Open Call winner and her resulting project, The Privilege of Escape, won Most Innovative Immersive Experience in the 2019 Immersion Awards. Puno's art has been featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and The Boston Globe. Puno studied art and medicine at Brown University and earned her MFA from New York University. 

Carolina Đỗ & Annie Jin Wang

Untitled Seagull Project

September 29 & 30

Using Chekhov’s The Seagull as a point of departure, Carolina and Annie are generating a theatrical investigation/love letter to their families, ancestors, selves, and fellow Asian American community members who have had to sublimate their identities in the pursuit of being understood.

Carolina Đỗ (she/her) is an actor, playwright, producer and proud daughter of Vietnamese freedom fighters and refugees. Broadway: Linda Vista, Grand Horizons. New York credits include Is It Supposed To Last? (PlayCo), The Refugees (Adjusted Realists), Stacey In The States, 410[Gone] (Yangtze Rep), The 24 Hour Plays. Regional credits include the world premiere of Dinner and Cake (Everyman Theatre). TV: The Blacklist, Law and Order: SVU, Blue Bloods, FBI: Most Wanted. Film: Children of the Dust, Ma's Kitchen, CRAM (Austin Film Fest), AVIVA (SXSW). Playwriting: 2022-2023 Orchard Project Greenhouse Lab Artist, JACK 2021 Residency. Her play buried ruins was a 2023 O’Neill Semifinalist, 2022 Princess Grace Semi-Finalist, 2022 Bushwick Starr Finalist, and 2020 BricLab Finalist. She was also a 2023 finalist for the Leah Ryan Fund. She is co-founder and producing artistic leader of The Sống Collective. Community Engagement Manager at PlayCo. She was a founding member of Asians4Abolition. 

Annie Jin Wang (she/her) is a first-generation Chinese American dramaturg and writer based in Brooklyn. She is currently supporting new projects in development at Beth Morrison Projects, the O’Neill National Musical Theatre Conference, Yangtze Rep, PAC NYC, and the Playwrights Center. Recent credits include The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group, The Civilians, Fault Line Theatre, The Brick, Theater Mu, Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company, and the Croatian National Theatre. Her writing has been developed at Target Margin Theater and Fresh Ground Pepper. Annie is the Associate Director for Programming at PlayCo and the Artistic Associate at Theater Mu. MFA: Columbia University; BA: Wellesley College. 

Soho Rep 2023-24 Productions

Soho Rep presents

Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It's That Time of the Month 

World Premiere

Created by Becca Blackwell

Written and Performed by Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte

Developed with Jess Barbagallo and Greg Corbino

Directed by Jess Barbagallo

Presented in association with The Bushwick Starr

October 25 - December 3, 2023

Tickets: $35 

99c Sundays: November 12 & 19

“Trigger Warning: There will be fluids!”

Snatch Adams is a 6-foot tall vagina who lost her job as a clown at Planned Parenthood in 2016. After knocking on clinic doors across America, only to find them shuttered, she is finally hired to host a talk show with recently Me-Too'ed comic Tainty McCracken! Along with a rotating roster of celebrity guests, Snatch and Tainty fart, flirt, and squirt in order to bring awareness and love to genitals and their human companions everywhere.

Join us at this original queer spectacle featuring puppets, prizes, and perversity, and celebrate the power and autonomy of loudmouthed vagina people while you still can. You'll laugh so hard you'll go number three!

Becca Blackwell (they/them) is an NYC-based trans actor, performer, and writer. Existing between genders, Blackwell works collaboratively with playwrights and directors to expand our sense of personhood and the body through performance. Some of their collaborations have been with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok, Richard Maxwell, Erin Markey, Sharon Hayes, Theater of the Two Headed Calf and Lisa D'Amour. Film/TV includes Survival of the Thickest, Bros, Sort Of, High Maintenance, Ramy, Marriage Story, Shameless, Deadman's Barstool, and Jack in the Box. They have toured their solo shows They, Themself and Schmerm and Schmermie's Choice across the U.S. and are currently creating a new show, Back To She, that will premiere in 2024. Blackwell was a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, the Franklin Furnace award and the Creative Capital Award.   

Amanda Duarte (she/her) is a writer-performer who lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time Out New York, among other publications, and she has appeared on stages large, small, and legally nonexistent across, above and under the city for two decades. Recent shows include Staying Alive at Joe's Pub, the long-running cult favorite Dead Darlings at Judson, and the Nasty Women comedy series at the 14th St. Y. Current projects include farming, strenuous attempts at astral projection, and political subterfuge. For six years, she has been fortunate enough to collaborate with Becca Blackwell and wear the indeed heavy but truly priceless rectal crown of Tainty McCracken. 

Jess Barbagallo (he/him) is a theater artist, teacher, and writer. Some creations include: Sentence Fetish (The Brick’s Trans Theater Festival, NYC); Not for Resale (in collaboration with NYU Steinhardt’s Drama Therapy as Performance, Provincetown Playhouse); Beaches in Winter (Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU); Room for Cream: A Live Lesbian Serial (with the Dyke Division at LaMama ETC/The New Museum, NYC); The Puzzlers/The Puzzlers 2: Black Box (with Accent Wall Productions at The Brick’s Exponential Festival); Weekend at Barry’s/Lesbian Lighthouse (Abrons Arts Center, NYC); and Weekend at Barry’s: Greatest Hits (The Brick). He is a regular contributor at Artforum.

Barbara Samuels (she/her) is a queer producer, organizer, and lighting designer. Barbara uses a diversity of approaches to invest in generous, innovative, intersectional, and antiracist design-forward live events—aiming to unearth the human condition while destabilizing harmful power structures. Samuels is currently developing projects with Kedian Keohan and Becca Blackwell. She served as the General Manager of OBIE Award-winning 13P from 2008-2012, and as Producing Director of Morgan Gould and Friends from 2014-2018. In 2016, in addition to being a Target Margin Institute Fellow, The Interval named Barbara a Woman to Watch. Samuels currently runs the Wingspace Mentorship Program. She holds a B.A. from Fordham University and an M.F.A in Lighting Design from NYU. Proud member of USA Local 829. 2022-24 WP Producers Lab. New Georges Affiliated Artist.

Greg Corbino (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist, puppeteer, and educator. His work investigates how object performance and sculpture crafted from refuse material and engaged by community can create queer ecologies of care and action in public space. It is deeply invested in nature and aspires to be zero waste, creating work from recycled, found and salvaged materials as an act of repair. Gregory is a long time collaborator with Peter Schumann and The Bread and Puppet Theater where he was a full time company member from 2012-2016. He has worked with Xaviera Simmons, Cecilia Vicuña Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok, Reverend Billy, Savitri D and The Stop Shopping Choir, Amy Trompeter, John Heginbotham and Cathy Weiss. As a designer and fabricator his work has been seen at The Guggenheim Museum, The High Line and The Queens Museum, The Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Smithsonian Institution. Residencies have included LMCC Arts Center Governors Island (NYC), QueerLab (Rome) Isadora Duncan Dance Center (Greece) and Togo Village Art Museum (Taiwan).

The Bushwick Starr is a nonprofit theater that cooperatively nurtures the creative spirit that has defined our neighborhood for decades. In creating close communion with professional and student performing artists to develop original work, we cultivate an electric space for embodied performance that respects and reflects the community that surrounds us. Since 2007, the Starr has served as a destination for bold and engaging performance. Past Seasons have included new work from groundbreaking artists such as Ryan J. Haddad, Whitney White, Jeremy O. Harris, Heather Christian, Diana Oh, The Mad Ones, Haruna Lee, Clare Barron, and Daniel Fish. The Starr will establish its permanent home at 419 Eldert Street in 2024, creating a lasting cultural asset for Bushwick and for artists, students, and audiences across New York City. For more information, please visitthebushwickstarr.org/campaign.

Theatre for a New Audience and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company present
Soho Rep & NAATCO’s National Partnership Project’s Production of 

Public Obscenities

Written and Directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company: November-December 2023

Theater for a New Audience: January-February 2024

“Chhobi hoye giyechhe.

What’s that?

That’s what we say when somebody dies. Chhobi hoye giyechhe. He has “become a picture."

When Choton returns to Kolkata on a research trip with his Black American boyfriend Raheem, his grandfather's photograph stares down at him from the walls of his family home. Choton loves being the translator, toggling nimbly between Bangla and English, interviewing queer locals, showing Raheem his world. But through the lens of Choton's grandfather's old camera, Raheem begins to notice things Choton can't. Peer into this bilingual play from visionary writer-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury about the things we see, the things we miss, and the things that turn us on.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury (he/him) is a many-tentacled writer and director based in Brooklyn. A Mark O’Donnell Prize and Princess Grace Award recipient, Chowdhury was an inaugural Project Number One Artist at Soho Rep, where he recently directed the world premiere of his playwriting debut Public Obscenities "with a swooning hypnotism reminiscent of the best works of neorealism" (New York Times, Critic's Pick). Co-produced by NAATCO, Public Obscenities was nominated for three Drama League and four Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Direction, and the cast won the Drama Desk Ensemble Award for embodying "the transnational world" of Chowdhury’s "bilingual play with memorable authenticity, remarkable specificity, and extraordinary warmth.” Chowdhury is also a Jonathan Larson Grant awardee for his body of work writing musical theater with composer Laura Grill Jaye; their as yet unproduced musical How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia was awarded the 2022 Relentless Award in honor of Adam Schlesinger and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Chowdhury was also a collaborator on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns. Other recent collaborations: Brother, Brother (New York Theatre Workshop) with Aleshea Harris; SPEECH (Philly Fringe) with Lightning Rod Special; MukhAgni (Under the Radar @ The Public Theater) with Kameron Neal. A Sundance Fellow, Chowdhury is the creator of VICHITRA, a series of short films including Englandbashi (Ann Arbor Film Festival); The Other Other (Ars Nova); An Anthology of Queer Dreams (Audio Unbound Award finalist); and In Order to Become (The Bushwick Starr). A NYSCA/NYFA, Fulbright, and Kundiman fellow in poetry, Chowdhuryhas been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Residencies: Hermitage, Ucross, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, SPACE on Ryder Farm, NYTW 2050, The Public’s Devised Theater Working Group, Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab, New York Stage and Film, Drama League, Mercury Store, BRIC. BA: Stanford. MFA: Columbia.

NAATCO asserts the presence and significance of Asian American theater in the United States, demonstrating its vital contributions to the fabric of American culture by presenting the following repertory: European and American classics as written with all Asian American casts; adaptations of these classics by Asian American Playwrights; new plays – preferably world premieres – written by non-Asian Americans, not for or about Asian Americans, but realized by an all-Asian American cast; and new plays by Asian American Playwrights that incorporate other performative arts and media. Their latest initiative, the NAATCO National Partnership Project, establishes relationships with theaters around the country to ingrain the inclusion of Asian American theater artists, technicians, and administrators in their programming for the long run. NAATCO puts into service its total commitment to Asian American theater artists to more accurately represent onstage the multi- and intercultural dynamics of our society, demonstrating a rich tapestry of cultural difference bound by the American experience. NAATCO has been honored by the Obies (Performance, Awake and Sing! and the Ross Wetzsteon Award); the Rosetta LeNoire Award (Actors Equity); Drama Desk nominations (Henry VI, Shakespeare’s Trilogy in Two Parts; Out of Time; A Play on War); and a Drama League nomination (Awake and Sing!).

The Tony Award®-winning Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company creates badass theater that highlights the stunning, challenging, and tremendous complexity of our world. For over 40 years, Woolly has maintained a high standard of artistic rigor while simultaneously daring to take risks, innovate, and push beyond perceived boundaries. One of the few remaining theaters in the country to maintain a company of artists, Woolly serves an essential research and development role within the American theater. Plays premiered here have gone on to productions at hundreds of theaters all over the world and have had lasting impacts on the field. Currently co-led by Artistic Director Maria Manuela Goyanes and Managing Director Kimberly E. Douglas, Woolly is located in Washington, D.C., equidistant from the Capitol and the White House. This unique location influences Woolly’s investment in actively working towards an equitable, participatory, and creative democracy. 

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director, Dorothy Ryan, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. It nurtures artists, culture, and community. Recognizing that each audience is new and different from the last one, TFANA is dedicated to forging an exchange between artist and playgoer that is immediate and direct, and to the ongoing search for a living, human theater. With Shakespeare as its supreme guide, TFANA explores the ever-changing forms of world theater and builds a dialogue spanning centuries between the language and ideas of Shakespeare and diverse authors, past and present. 

The Fires

Written and directed by Raja Feather Kelly

World Premiere Commission

May 8 - June 16, 2024

Tickets: $35-45

99c Sundays: June 2 & 9, 2024

"Fantasy, fiction, flirting and kissing, or fighting and f-ing. Y’all need to get married and just die in each other’s game playin’ arms."

In 1971, 1998, and 2021, three different men in a South Brooklyn railroad apartment write, read, fuck each other (or don’t), eat, drink, diet, breakup, make up, fight, and flirt at the same time. 

The Fires is a poetic and surreal new play about being a somebody in a world of other somebodies while trying on love. 

Raja Feather Kelly (he/him) is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the dance-theater-media company the feath3r theory, for which he has created 18 premieres, most recently UGLY Part 3: BLUE (Chelsea Factory) and the forthcoming The Absolute Future (NYU Skirball). Kelly’s most recent works outside of TF3T are White Girl in Danger (Second Stage), Bunny Bunny (UC San Diego), and Scenes for an Ending for the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. He choreographed the Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon), winner of two Tony Awards, including Best Musical. His Off-Broadway collaborators include Lileana Blain-Cruz, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Sarah Benson, and Michael R. Jackson. His work has been seen at Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Soho Rep, and New York Live Arts, among many other venues. He’s worked on two Pulitzer Prize-winning productions and has received a Princeton Arts Fellowship, three Princess Grace Awards, an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle honor, and many others. 

About Soho Rep

Soho Rep provides radical theater makers with productions of the highest caliber and tailor-made development at key junctures in their artistic practice. The organization elevates artists as thought leaders and citizens who change the field and society. Artistic autonomy is paramount at Soho Rep; the organization encourages an unmediated connection between artists and audiences to create a springboard for transformation and rich civic life beyond the walls of its theater.

Soho Rep has also been honored with a Drama Desk Award for Sustained Achievement. Over the last decade, Soho Rep productions have garnered 21 OBIE Awards; the 2016 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical; 18 Drama Desk nominations; two Kesselring Awards; The New York Times Outstanding Playwriting Award for Dan LeFranc’s Sixty Miles To Silverlake; and a special citation in The New York Drama Critics’ Circle’s 2012-13 awards. Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, commissioned by Soho Rep and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In recent years, Soho Rep has presented plays by established and emerging theater artists such as David Adjmi, Annie Baker, Alice Birch, Debbie Tucker Green, Aleshea Harris, Lucas Hnath, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Daniel Alexander Jones, Richard Maxwell, Sarah Kane, Young Jean Lee, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Anne Washburn.

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