The Precipice at Lincoln Center Presents

Following a residency at Williamstown in 2022 and a private salon with the feminist organization, Black Women’s Blueprint, Tony-winner Laura Benanti and writer & composer Miranda Ferriss Jones are bringing The Precipice to the David Rubenstein Atrium as part of the Lincoln Center Presents 2026-27 season and at the Van Vleck Gardens as a part of its Cultural ARTS series. These performances invite audiences to peek behind the curtain at what’s ahead for this developing piece.

The Precipice features book, music and lyrics by Miranda Ferriss Jones (www.mirandaferrissjones.com) with Rebecca Martinez directing and Ayana Parker Morrison as producer. Select songs will be performed by Laura Benanti plus, Morgan Dudley, Samantha Williams, and students from Pace University. The band includes Sujin Kim-Ramsey, Simone Broucke, Vivi Rama, and Rich Mercurio

Born out of Miranda’s bi-racial upbringing in the expansive countryside of Vermont, The Precipice is an original fairytale musical that tells the story of Iris and Polly, two daughters of the Goddess of Dreams, Lady Midnight. Sent to Earth to inspire a broken society, Polly embodies the dark side of the moon and Iris is the light. Once on earth they are separated and come of age under vastly different circumstances. When they reunite as teenagers, they must navigate a narrow path to preserve their identities and sisterhood in a society determined to keep them stifled and apart. The Precipice asks, “What will you do when they come for your wildness?”

The Precipice will be presented on November 12th, 2026 as the second—and largest-scale—work in Miranda’s Lincoln Center Presents partnership. For the first time, audiences will be able to experience the full arc of the show from beginning to end, integrating both legacy material and newly composed work in a fully rewritten fairytale that reflects the evolution of the story since the 2022 Williamstown workshop.

The Precipice is dedicated to the late Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead who was one of the piece's first champions in its early conception and is credited as an Angel Producer.