Wooster Group News

Macbeth begins performances tonight, March 29, 2022, at the Longacre Theatre (220 West 48th Street) and opens on Thursday, April 28, 2022. Learn more about the cast bringing this show back to the stage!

PlayCo today announced the cast and creative team for its first in-person production since the fall before the pandemic: the U.S. premiere of Ebru Nihan Celkan’s Will You Come With Me?, directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, May 4-June 5 at MITU580.

CAGE SHUFFLE MARATHON – a full-length evening of dance and spoken word set to John Cage’s 90, one-minute stories from his 1963 score INDETERMINANCY – will be given its world premiere February 15-19 when Paul Lazar and several guest artists  take the stage at La MaMa’s Downstairs theater.

 Following a sold-out run this fall, The Wooster Group’s new production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, will return to New York for a special limited engagement. Performances will run February 18 to March 12, 2022, at The Performing Garage (33 Wooster Street).

Author Theresa Smalec and New York Theatre artists John Jesurun and Mariane Weems join the Segal Talks series on November 29th to discuss Smalec's new book: Ron Vawter’s Life in Performance. The discussion is part of the Segal Center's Fall 2021 Book Talk Series & will be moderated by Frank Hentschker and directed by MESTC, The Graduate Center CUNY.

Following a sold-out season at Belvoir’s Downstairs Theatre in 2020, 44 Sex Acts in One Week will return to Sydney - bigger and (if it’s actually possible) even better, for a revamped and reimagined season from 12th to 16th January at the Seymour Centre, as part of Sydney Festival’s 2022 program. 

 The Wooster Group’s new production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, has been extended by two weeks. Performances will now run through November 20 at The Performing Garage (33 Wooster Street), with an official opening on October 26, 2021. 

TFANA and Saint Flashlight present The Will of the City, poems inspired by playwright and poet William Shakespeare, launching today and running through the fall. Spotlighting the work of over a dozen writers, this activation will transform the streetside and outdoor screens at Polonsky Shakespeare Center (262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY)—Theatre for a New Audience's home in Fort Greene—into a bi-weekly updated anthology of poems inspired by Shakespeare's plays.

Tony Award-nominated and Obie Award-winning theater company Clubbed Thumb and two-time Tony Award nominee Heidi Schreck have announced the Clubbed Thumb Constitution Commissions.

Soho Rep. today announced a robust 2021-22 season with which it will reopen its home at 46 Walker Street. The company welcomes full-capacity in-person audiences back for the first time since late 2019 with the presentation of works-in-progress from the Writer/Director Lab, a signature program of the theater for over two decades.

Following its world premiere at Vienna’s prestigious Wiener Festwochen, The Wooster Group’s new production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, will open in New York at The Performing Garage (33 Wooster Street).

The Tank announced today two new co-productions for their Summer 2021 season. Samuel is an audio-visual experience by Alexis Roblan and directed by Dara Malina. Botte di Ferro is a new play about love, memory, class, and how communication shapes perception.

And now for something ethereal, funny and more than a little trippy. On June 26, The Marsh presents 'Astronautica,' a musical drawn from the words of women who have traveled through outer space, to its digital platform, MarshStream. Conceived and performed by Hai-Ting Chinn, Lindsay Kesselman & Kirsten Sollek. BroadwayWorld speaks with Ms. Chinn.

After spearheading a $3M renovation of Austin’s largest theater, Executive & Artistic Director Bob Bursey has announced his first curated season of music, dance, theater, and performance for Texas Performing Arts. A dozen live productions will mark its 40th Anniversary season in 2021-2022.

The Performing Garage has announced Kaneza Schaal: Towards A New Collectivity, a partnership with theater maker Kaneza Schaal. She will invite a group of artists to develop work at The Performing Garage with the long-term goal of building a new creative ecosystem.

The Wooster Group will premiere its new production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother at Vienna’s international Wiener Festwochen from June 8-17, 2021. It tells a story of a poor, uneducated Russian mother’s journey to revolutionary action. The play premiered in Berlin in 1932 and was the last of Brecht’s plays to open before the Nazis seized power. 

Mabou Mines today has announced a group of multidisciplinary artists whose work affirms the company’s 51-year history of collaboration and experimentation. Co-Artistic Directors Karen Kandel, Sharon Ann Fogarty, Mallory Catlett, and Carl Hancock Rux welcome new Associate Artists and members in a new category: Senior Artistic Associates.

There are just some people on this planet who naturally operate on a more creative level than the rest of us, and mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn is clearly one of those people. She is bringing her wildly inventive musical science show Science Fair: An Opera with Experiments to The Marsh on Saturday, March 6th.  Conceived and performed by Chinn with pianist Erika Switzer, Science Fair pairs luscious operatic vocals with light-hearted humor and science lectures. Chinn herself describes it as “a classical cabaret of science songs with science communication staging, including live experiments and slide shows, a little audience participation and a general sort of Bill Nye fun.” Science Fair will be available for livestream at 5:00pm PST on March 6th, followed by a post-performance Q&A with The Marsh Founder/Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman. Chinn will also appear two days prior to that on Stephanie’s MarshStream at 7:30pm on Thursday, March 4th to discuss this innovative work. For more information, visit www.themarsh.org/marshstream. BroadwayWorld caught up with Chinn last week from her home in the Hudson Valley, where she had just moved from New York City only two days earlier. A Northern California native with degrees from the Eastman and Yale Schools of Music, Shinn has enjoyed an unusually eclectic career, with credits as varied as touring around the world in Phillip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, playing Lady Thiang in The King & I on the West End, and performing with the experimental Wooster Group in New York. Given her resume, I had thought she might be fascinating to talk to, and she did not disappoint. I mean, what other opera singers do you know who do science in their spare time, just for fun? We talked about how Science Fair came to be, her passion for the creative process, and our evolving understanding around issues of racial and gender equity. In conversation, she is candid and accessible, brainy and funny, and always very, very thoughtful. Underlying everything is her enduring joy in pushing the boundaries of what it means to create musical art.

Acclaimed mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn brings her eclectic musical science show to The Marsh with Science Fair: An Opera with Experiments. Conceived and performed by Chinn with pianist Erika Switzer, Science Fair pairs luscious operatic vocals with light-hearted humor and science lectures. 

On January 28, Frances McDormand and Kate Valk will host the first installment of Fran & Kate's Drama Club, a live Zoom series about The Wooster Group’s storied past, emboldened present, and speculative futures. Proceeds from the event will support The Performing Garage.