Northern Stage Will Host 2024/25 New Works Now Festival

Northern Stage has announced a fresh and bold line-up of new works for the 2024/25 season. Established in 2014, the New Works Now Festival embodies Northern Stage’s commitment to developing new work for the American theater. Since then, the New Works Now mission has grown to include providing additional workshop opportunities, producing New Works Now-nurtured plays as part of the main stage season when possible, and making a concerted effort to shepherd these plays into a bright future on the American stage.

This year’s New Works Now will feature two new plays that came to Northern Stage via different collaborations, with weeklong workshops taking place during February 2025.

“We are thrilled to share two fantastic new works by female playwrights this year,” says Sarah Elizabeth Wansley, Northern Stage’s BOLD Associate Artistic Director. “Our Neukom Award winner Intimate Surveillance speaks urgently to today on the issue of data privacy and gender, while Wonder re-imagines a classic female-driven comedy through a completely contemporary lens. We look forward to bringing these wildly different pieces that center women’s voices and experiences into conversation.”

This year’s New Works Now will first present staged readings of the winner of the 2024 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Playwriting, an annual partnership between the Neukom Institute at Dartmouth College, the Department of Theater at Dartmouth College, and Northern Stage. The 2024 Neukom Award-winning Intimate Surveillance by Scottish playwright Catherine Stewart probes deep into technology’s role in our private lives. When disgraced entrepreneur Mina James sits down with storied journalist David Mendez, a seemingly innocent interview on Mina's new invention quickly unravels out of her control with David's relentless and searing questions. Stewart's taut 90-minute drama unfolds in real-time over one charged conversation, pushing Mina--and all of us--to grapple with the reality and consequences of allowing technology to surveil some of our most intimate aspects of life. Intimate Surveillance will be directed by Marie Cisco, an Atlanta-based artist and the BOLD Associate Artistic Director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, GA. 

The weeklong workshop of Intimate Surveillance will culminate in two free public readings: the first reading will take place in the Byrne Theater at the Barrette Center for the Arts on February 14 at 7:30 PM; the second reading will take place on February 15 in Filene Auditorium at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH at 2:00 PM. Click HERE to learn more about the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Playwriting.

New Works Now will also feature Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret by Talene Monahon, a BOLD Ventures project made possible through the generous support of the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation. A family vacation on the high seas goes awry when a famous painting is discovered missing and the culprit is suspected to be one of the passengers aboard the Aqua Royale: Paris to Portugal. Loosely adapted from Susannah Centlivre's 1714 under-sung farce of the same name, Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret follows a colorful cast including a pair of jealous lovers, an iceberg-phobic captain, a frustrated musical revue performer, a scheming mother-in-law, and an enterprising toilet maid as they try to make it to Lisbon with a boat-load of secrets. Monahon’s piece will be directed by Northern Stage veteran Aileen Wen McGroddy, who most recently brought the production of Sisters to life here at Northern Stage.

Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret will have a public reading in the Byrne Theater at the Barrette Center for the Arts at Northern Stage on February 16 at 1:00 PM. This project is made possible by the BOLD Ventures Grant, a Helen Gurley Brown Foundation initiative to support new works in American Theater.

To post a comment, you must register and login.