New Plays by Paula Vogel, Jen Silverman and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Included in Second Stage Theater's 2023/24 Season

Second Stage Theater (Carole Rothman, President & Artistic Director; Lisa Lawer Post, Interim Executive Director) has just announced three initial productions for its upcoming 45th Anniversary Season. Additional season productions will be announced in the coming months.

The season will kick off in November 2023 with the world premiere of Guggenheim Fellow Jen Silverman’s (Collective Rage) play, SPAIN, directed by Tyne Rafaeli (The Coast Starlight), off-Broadway at the Tony Kiser Theater (305 West 43rd Street). The fall will also see the Broadway debut of Obie Award-winner and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (The Comeuppance, An Octoroon) when his acclaimed play, APPROPRIATE, debuts at the Hayes Theater in an all-new production directed by Lila Neugebauer (2ST’s Mary Page Marlowe).

Spring 2024 will see the world premiere of an untitled new play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned To Drive), directed by Tina Landau (The SpongeBob Musical) at the Hayes Theater.

Casting and full creative teams will be announced at a later date.

“It’s been 45 years since Second Stage Theater was launched in a small loft space on the Upper West Side and I couldn’t be prouder to announce this trio of plays, including two we commissioned, as part of our 45th Anniversary Season,” said Second Stage Founder and Artistic Director Carole Rothman. “I’m thrilled to celebrate this milestone with these superlative playwrights and directors, continuing Second Stage’s mission of producing plays exclusively by living American writers. We look forward to welcoming audiences to what we know will be a season of world-class productions.”

Full Season Subscriptions are now available, 5-Play packages are $445. 3 Show packages are $350. For those 30 years of age and younger, Flip the Script 5 Play packages are $150. To purchase a subscription, please visit 2ST.com or call 212-246-4422. Subscribers receive early access to a winter festival of plays and readings by new American writers.  More information to be announced in the coming months.

Second Stage Theater's programs are made possible by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

This season is supported by a grant from the Howard Gilman Foundation. Spain is the recipient of the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theatre Visions Fund award.

Additional information on the season’s productions below:

SPAIN

World Premiere at off-Broadway’s Tony Kiser Theater
By Jen Silverman
Directed by Tyne Rafaeli
Performances begin November 2023
Opening late November 2023

SPAIN is the recipient of the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theatre Visions Fund award.

Step into a sophisticated, slippery world where the line between truth and fiction is all in the packaging. It's 1936, and a pair of passionate filmmakers have landed their next big project: a sweeping Spanish Civil War film with the potential to change American hearts and minds. It just happens to be bankrolled by the KGB. This seductive and funny new play about the art of propaganda and the dangerous ongoing Disinformation Age explores how art can change the world—for better and worse.

Jen Silverman is a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Plays include Spain; Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties; The Moors; The Roommate; Witch; and Highway Patrol. Books include the novel We Play Ourselves, and story collection The Island Dwellers; Jen’s next novel is forthcoming from Random House in 2024. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Fellow and a member of New Dramatists. Honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim. Jen also writes for TV and film.

Tyne Rafaeli is a Drama Desk Award-nominated director whose work spans theater, TV, film, and audio.  Tyne is currently co-producing and directing “Vantage,” a new scripted audio series with Emmy Rossum’s company. Theater directing credits include Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight (Lincoln Center), Brian Watkins’ Epiphany (Lincoln Center), Sylvia Khoury’s Power Strip (LCT3), Selling Kabul (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theatre Festival), Ming Peiffer’s Usual Girls (Roundabout), and Craig Lucas’s I Was Most Alive With You (Playwrights Horizons). TV directing credits include “The Good Fight” and “Single Drunk Female.”

APPROPRIATE

Broadway Premiere at Hayes Theater
By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Directed by Lila Neugebauer
Performances begin November 2023
Opening December 2023

Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie Award-winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon) and Drama Desk Award-winner Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery, 2ST’s Mary Page Marlowe) invite you to one helluva reunion in this darkly comic American family drama. 

It’s summer, the cicadas are singing, and the Lafayette family has returned to their late patriarch’s Arkansas home to deal with The Remains of his estate. Toni, the eldest daughter, hopes they’ll spend the weekend remembering and reconnecting over their beloved father. Bo, her brother, wants to recoup some of the funds he spent caring for Dad at the end of his life. But things take a turn when their estranged brother, Franz, appears late one night, and mysterious objects are discovered among the clutter. Suddenly, long-hidden secrets and buried resentments can’t be contained, and the family is forced to face the ghosts of their past.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright and producer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.  Recent theatre credits include The Comeuppance, currently playing at the Signature Theatre, Girls (Yale Rep), Everybody (Signature Theatre), War (Yale Rep; Lincoln Center/LCT3), Gloria (Vineyard Theatre), Appropriate (Obie Award; Signature Theatre), An Octoroon (Obie Award; Soho Rep, Theatre for a New Audience), and Neighbors (The Public Theater). He was showrunner, executive producer, and writer for HULU/FX’s drama series, “Kindred,” based on Octavia E. Butler’s groundbreaking novel. He currently teaches at Yale University and serves as Vice President of the Dramatists Guild council and on the boards of Soho Rep, Park Avenue Armory, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation.  Honors include a USA Artists fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the MacArthur fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award.  

Lila Neugebauer is an award-winning stage and screen director. Broadway: Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery. Recent Off-Broadway credits include Simon Stephens’ Morning Sun (MTC), Tracy Letts’ Mary Page Marlowe (Second Stage); Annie Baker’s The Antipodes; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Everybody; Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife/The Zoo Story (Signature Theatre); Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves; and Zoe Kazan’s After the Blast (Lincoln Center). As co-Artistic Director of The Mad Ones: Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie (Ars Nova) and Miles for Mary (Playwrights Horizons), among others. Lila is an alum of the Drama League, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, an Ensemble Studio Theatre member, New Georges Affiliated Artist, and New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect. Obie Award, Drama Desk Sam Norkin Special Award, and Princess Grace Award recipient. TV: “Maid” (Netflix), “The Last Thing He Told Me” (Apple TV+), “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” and “Room 104” (HBO Max). Lila’s directorial feature debut Causeway, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry (Oscar nomination), is available on AppleTV+.

A New Play

At Hayes Theater
By Paula Vogel
Directed by Tina Landau
Performances begin late March 2024
Opening April 2024

Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) has written an unflinchingly honest and bitingly funny play about the hold our family has over us, and our coming to terms with the scars we leave on each other.

It’s 1962, just outside of D.C., and matriarch Phyllis is supervising her teenage children, Carl and Martha, as they move into a new apartment. Phyllis has strong ideas about what her children need to do and be to succeed, and woe be the child who finds their own path. Bolstered by gin and cigarettes, the family endures — or survives — the changing world around them.

Paula Vogel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose plays include Indecent (Tony Award nomination for Best Play), How I Learned to Drive (Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony Award nomination, the Lortel Prize, OBIE Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play), The Long Christmas Ride Home, The Mineola Twins, The Baltimore Waltz, Hot’n’Throbbing, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, The Oldest Profession and A Civil War Christmas. In June 2020, she founded Paula Vogel’s Bard at the Gate, a uniquely curated virtual reading series designed to become a widely accessible platform for powerful, overlooked plays by BIPOC, female, LGBTQIA+, and disabled artists.  Lifetime achievement awards include:  American Theatre Hall of Fame Award, the Obie Award, and NY Drama Critics Circle Award.  She is honored to have awards dedicated to emerging playwrights in her name: The American College Theatre Festival's Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, and the Paula Vogel Award given annually by the Vineyard Theatre. She was the 2019 inaugural UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Hearst Theater Lab Initiative Distinguished Playwright-in-Residence. Her plays are published in six volumes by TCG Press and her memoir will be published by Penguin Press. She teaches playwriting workshops throughout the United States and abroad. www.paulavogelplaywright.com

Tina Landau is a writer and director whose work has been produced on Broadway and Off, internationally and regionally, and most frequently at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago where she is an ensemble member. Known for her original, large-scale musical and ensemble work, Tina’s been recognized by the Tony Awards, Drama Desks, Drama League, Outer Critics, Lucille Lortel, and Obies among others. Her Broadway credits include The SpongeBob Musical (also conceiver; Drama Desk & Outer Critics Circle winner Best Direction and Best Musical, 12 Tony Award noms), Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, and the revival of Bells Are Ringing (Tony noms.). Tina both wrote and directed the plays Ms. Blakk For  President (with Tarell McCraney, Steppenwolf); Space (Steppenwolf, The Taper, The  Public NYC); Beauty (La Jolla Playhouse); Stonewall: Night Variations (En Garde  Arts); and the musicals Floyd Collins (composer Adam Guettel) and Dream True (composer Ricky Ian Gordon). Off-Broadway, she’s directed premieres including three plays of Tarell McCraney, Head Of Passes (the Public, also Steppenwolf and Taper); In The Red and Brown Water (Public, also Alliance and McCarter); and Wig Out! (Vineyard); as well as Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s Old Hats (Signature), Paula Vogel’s A Civil War Christmas (NYTW), and many of the plays of Chuck Mee. As an ensemble member at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, her over 20 productions include McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays, The Tempest, and The Time Of Your Life (also Seattle Rep, ACT). She was an Artist-in-Residence at Little Island in NYC, and is the co-author, with Anne Bogart, of The Viewpoints Book. Tina recently opened A Transparent Musical at Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, and her new musical Redwood (book and co-lyrics, with composer Kate Diaz) will premiere next season at La Jolla Playhouse, starring Idina Menzel.

ABOUT Second Stage Theater

Under the artistic direction of Carole Rothman, Second Stage Theater operates three New York City venues, exclusively dedicated to producing living American Playwrights.

Among Second Stage’s 180 productions are the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner Between Riverside and Crazy by Stephen Adly Guirgis; the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner Next to Normal by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey; the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegria Hudes; Mary Page Marlowe by Tracy Letts; The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown; Dogfight by Benj Pasek, Justin Paul and Peter Duchan; Dear Evan Hansen by Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, and Steven Levenson; Clyde’s and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark by Lynn Nottage; Trust and Lonely, I’m Not by Paul Weitz; Grand Horizons by Bess Wohl; The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz; Everyday Rapture and Whorl Inside a Loop by Dick Scanlan and Sherie Rene Scott; Let Me Down Easy and Notes From the Field by Anna Deavere Smith; Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo; Torch Song by Harvey Fierstein; Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl; The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter Beane; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee by William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin; Jitney by August Wilson; Crowns by Regina Taylor; Saturday Night by Stephen Sondheim; Afterbirth: Kathy & Mo’s Greatest Hits by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy; This Is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan; Coastal Disturbances by Tina Howe; A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller; The Good Times Are Killing Me by Lynda Barry; and Tiny Alice and Peter and Jerry by Edward Albee.

The company’s more than 170 citations include the 2022 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play for Take Me Out, as well as Best Featured Actor in a Play for Jesse Tyler Ferguson; six 2017 Tony Awards for Dear Evan Hansen (Best Musical; Best Lead Actor in a Musical, Ben Platt; Best Featured Actress in a Musical, Rachel Bay Jones; Best Book of a Musical; Best Original Score; Best Orchestrations); the 2009 Tony Awards for Best Lead Actress in a Musical (Alice Ripley, Next to Normal), Best Score (Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, Next to Normal), and Best Orchestrations (Tom Kitt and Michael Starobin, Next to Normal); the 2007 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play (Julie White, The Little Dog Laughed); the 2005 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical (Rachel Sheinkin, …Spelling Bee) and Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Dan Fogler, …Spelling Bee); the 2002 Tony Award for Best Director of a Play (Mary Zimmerman for Metamorphoses); the 2002 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Body of Work, 29 Obie Awards, 11 Outer Critics Circle Awards, four Clarence Derwent Awards, 20 Drama Desk Awards, 11 Theatre World Awards, one Dorothy Louden Award, 20 Lucille Lortel Awards, the Drama Critics Circle Award and 23 AUDELCO Awards.

In 1999, Second Stage Theater opened The Tony Kiser Theater, its state-of-the-art, 296-seat theater, designed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. In 2002, Second Stage launched “Second Stage Theater Uptown” to showcase the work of up-and-coming artists at the 99-seat McGinn/Cazale Theater. The Theater supports artists through several programs that include residencies, fellowships and commissions, and engages students and community members through education and outreach programs.

In 2018, Second Stage began producing at its 581 seat Broadway home, The Hayes Theater. Originally named “The Little Theater” and built in 1912, the city landmark has been remodeled by David Rockwell of Rockwell Group.