Clubbed Thumb Announces SUMMERWORKS Festival Lineup

Five-time Obie Award-winning theater company Clubbed Thumb has announced the line-up for SUMMERWORKS, its annual series of new plays. Now in its 21st season, SUMMERWORKS will run May 27 through July 9 at The Wild Project (195 E 3rd Street) in Manhattan, and will feature productions of three new plays: EVERY ANGEL IS BRUTAL by Julia Jarcho and directed by Knud Adams; THE TOMB OF KING TOT by Eric Dufault and directed by Portia Krieger; and TUMACHO by Ethan Lipton and directed by Leigh Silverman. Festival passes are now on sale at: https://www.artful.ly/clubbedthumb/store/passes.

With its track record for discovering and supporting new playwriting talent - in many cases providing writers with their very first production in New York or anywhere - SUMMERWORKS is one of the most eagerly-anticipated theatrical offerings of the year.

The 20th Annual SUMMERWORKS was the birthplace of the critically acclaimed comedy MEN ON BOATS, which returns to the New York stage this summer in a co-production by Playwrights Horizons and Clubbed Thumb. Written by Jaclyn Backhaus and directed by American Theater Company's newly appointed Artistic Director Will Davis, MEN ON BOATS will move uptown to Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 West 42nd Street) for a four-week limited engagement beginning Tuesday, July 19.

Highlights from the previous 20 festivals include the NYC premieres of Gina Gionfriddo, Jordan Harrison, Lisa D'Amour, Jason Grote and Sarah Ruhl; professional debuts of Rinne Groff, Sylvan Oswald, Clare Barron, Susan Stanton and Ariel Stess; and new work by Anne Washburn, Adam Bock, Gregory Moss, Jenny Schwartz, Ethan Lipton, Erin Courtney and Sheila Callaghan, who all continue to make Clubbed Thumb an artistic home.

Past SUMMERWORKS directors include Pam MacKinnon, who also serves as Clubbed Thumb's Board Chair, Lear deBessonet, Anne Kaufman, Davis McCallum and Ken Rus Schmoll.

The full SUMMERWORKS 2016 line-up includes:

EVERY ANGEL IS BRUTAL

By Julia Jarcho

Directed By Knud Adams

In this pitch-black comic thriller, three American coeds are recruited to serve their country undercover in Berlin, and have the time of their lives. Years later, they are forced to contend with what they really did, who they became and where to go from here. Cupcake Wars meets Marathon Man.

Julia Jarcho is a playwright and director from New York City, with the company Minor Theater (www.minortheater.org). She won a 2013 OBIE Award for the Best New American Play (Grimly Handsome) and a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Award. Upcoming with Minor Theater: The Terrifying, a scary new play about fear. Past productions include Nomads (Incubator Arts Project, 2014), Grimly Handsome (2013, Incubator and 2015, JACK), Dreamless Land (New York City Players, 2011), American Treasure (13P, 2009), The Highwayman (NTUSA performance space, Brooklyn; published in The Best American Short Plays of 2005-2006). She has developed plays with Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. She collaborated with the visual artist Meredith James on Delmar, a video-play (Jack Hanley gallery, Spring 2014) and has worked with artists including Alice Reagan, Richard Maxwell, and Aaron Landsman. She has won a Sarah Verdone Writing Award and a Berrilla Kerr award, and her plays have been supported by the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, a program of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and by the MAP Fund. She has been a resident playwright at the Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco, an advisory board member of Young Playwrights Inc., a resident writer at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, and a member of the award-winning playwrights' collective 13P. She teaches and writes about modern drama and playwriting at NYU.

Knud Adams is a director of experimental and new plays. His recent productions include Celine Song's Tom & Eliza (JACK), Max Posner's Snore (Juilliard) and Gun Logistics (Drama League), Carl Holder's An Intimate Evening with Typhoid Mary (New Ohio), Eliza Bent's Asleep at the Wheel (Brooklyn College), Sam Alper's Loveplay/Playmoney (La MaMa), Torrey Townsend's A Night Out (site specific), and Nick Jones' Salome of the Moon (Waterwell). After graduating from Kenyon College, he continued his training by assisting some of the nation's foremost theater artists, including André Gregory, Elizabeth LeCompte, Richard Foreman, Sam Gold, and Sarah Benson. He was a Drama League Directing Fellow, a member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and a Playwrights Horizons Directing Resident. www.KnudAdams.com

THE TOMB OF KING TOT

By Eric Dufault

Directed by Portia Krieger

An ambitious regionally-syndicated cartoonist gets good news (she's a finalist for an award!) and bad news (her daughter did something very, very terrible). Life and comic strip, hilarity and pain converge, then rupture. Inspired by the funnies, Richie Rich, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Eric Dufault's plays include Year of the Rooster (New York Times' Critics' Pick, John Gassner Outer Critics Circle Award), American Girls, and The Last Great Telemarketer. His works have been performed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Flea Theatre, the Marin Theatre Company, the 52nd Street Project, Great Plains Theatre Conference, among others. Eric is the recipient of the 2014 Playwrights of New York Fellowship, a 2013 Sloan Commission, the 2013 David Colicchio Emerging Playwright Award, the 2010 Lipkin Playwriting Award, and the 2008, 2009, and 2010 Harle Adair Damann Playwriting Award, and he's a member of the Obie award-winning Youngblood Playwriting Group and New Dramatists.

Portia Krieger is a New York-based theater director who mostly works on new plays and musicals. Recent productions include Caroline V. McGraw's The Bachelors for Lesser America, Gabrielle Reisman's site-specific outdoor King Lear adaptation Storm, Still for Brooklyn Yard, Peggy Stafford's 16 Words or Less and Clare Barron's Baby Screams Miracle for Clubbed Thumb, Caroline V. McGraw's The Vaults for New Georges, and Eager to Lose, a burlesque farce Portia co-created with writer Matthew-Lee Erlbach, director Wes Grantom, and burlesque starlet Tansy for Ars Nova. Coming up: Sarah Einspanier's The Convent of Pleasure for the Cherry Lane Mentor Project. Portia has workshopped new plays with Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage, Roundabout Underground, New York Stage & Film, Rattlestick, Page 73, Ars Nova, the Lark, the Juilliard School, and many others. She is an inaugural O'Neill/NNPN National Director's Fellow, a 2015-2016 New Georges Audrey Resident, an alumna of the Drama League Directors Project and the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, a former Ars Nova Director-in-Residence, and a co-founder of the New Georges Jam. She's also the Associate Director of Fun Home. Education: BA in Theater, Smith College.

TUMACHO

By Ethan Lipton

Directed by Leigh Silverman

Once again, the citizens of a frontier outpost are looking for someone to rescue them from the terrors of the local villain. Have they met their salvation--or an even bigger tyrant--when a fiend from the past comes to town? Jonathan Richman meets Jon Stewart meets John Ford in this Western comedy with music.

Ethan Lipton's plays include Red-Handed Otter (Playwrights Realm), Luther (Clubbed Thumb), and Meat (Powerhouse). His theatrical song cycle No Place to Go was premiered by the Public Theater (Obie Award) in Joe's Pub and has been presented in more than 20 cities in the US and UK. Ethan's plays have been seen in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, NYC, Edinburgh, and Berne. He is a Clubbed Thumb associate artist, an alumni of the Public's Emerging Writers Group, and was the inaugural Playwrights Realm Page One Fellow. Grants and commissions include NYFA, NYSCA and the NEA. His play Luther was published in the journal THEATER (Duke/Yale). With his band, Ethan Lipton and His Orchestra ("Best Lounge Act" New York Magazine), he has released five albums and played throughout New York and beyond. More info at www.ethanlipton.com.

Leigh Silverman a two-time Obie winner, directed the Encores! and Broadway productions of Jeanine Tesori's Violet and garnered a Tony Award nomination. Other Broadway credits include David Henry Hwang's Chinglish and Lisa Kron's Well as well as Andrew Lippa's Wild Party for Encores. She has directed over 30 Off-Broadway world premieres including: The Way We Get By (Second Stage); Bright Half Life (WP); American Hero (Second Stage and Williamstown Theater Festival); Kung Fu (Signature Theatre); The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence (Pulitzer finalist, Playwrights Horizons); The Call (Playwrights Horizons); The Madrid (MTC); Golden Child (Signature Theatre); No Place to Go (Public Theater; Two River Theatre); In the Wake (Center Theatre Group/Berkeley Rep and Public Theater, Obie Award, Lortel nomination); Go Back to Where You Are (Playwrights Horizons, Obie Award); From Up Here (MTC, Drama Desk nomination); Yellow Face (Pulitzer finalist, Center Theatre Group/Public Theater); Coraline (MCC/True Love); Hunting and Gathering (Primary Stages); Oedipus at Palm Springs (NYTW); The Beebo Brinker Chronicles (Hourglass Group); Blue Door (Playwrights Horizons/ Seattle Rep); Well (Public Theater; Huntington Theatre; ACT).

SUMMERWORKS 2016 is running May 27 through July 9 at The Wild Project, located at 195 E. 3rd Street, New York 10009 - between Avenues A and B in Manhattan's East Village. A full schedule will be announced soon. Festival passes are on sale now for $45 at: https://www.artful.ly/clubbedthumb/store/passes

Clubbed Thumb is supported in part by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additionally, Clubbed Thumb receives major support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Harold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Shubert Foundation, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, SEG Voices, and the Mental Insight Foundation.