Soho Rep to Depart its Home & Share Space With Playwrights Horizons

Soho Rep and Playwrights Horizons are launching a partnership meant to leverage the strengths of both organizations. Soho Rep will depart its longtime space at 46 Walker Street this January after more than 30 years and take up temporary residence at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater at 416 W. 42nd Street, where Soho Rep will produce the majority of its season for the next 2-3 years.
 
Before the move, Soho Rep will open its 2024-25 season with a final production at 46 Walker Street: Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, a world-premiere collaboration between two irreverent and provocative theater-makers — the downtown performance legend Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, an artist with deep roots at Soho Rep who won a 2024 Tony Award for the Broadway revival of his play Appropriate. The production will star Tropicana and reunite Jacobs-Jenkins with OBIE Award-winning director Eric Ting.
 
Details of Soho Rep’s 2024-25 season, the first programmed by its new artistic leaders Hammons and Ting, will be announced in September: Soho Rep’s first production in the Sharp Theater set for February 2025, a new Writer Director Lab cohort, three new commissions, and a series of events in January 2025 for Soho Rep’s community to pay homage to 46 Walker Street. The season will end with a co-production between Soho Rep and Playwrights Horizons which will begin performances in May. (See below for Playwrights Horizons’ recently announced 2024-25 season programming.)
 

Soho Rep at Playwrights Horizons
 

Since 1991, Soho Rep’s 65-seat venue at 46 Walker Street has been an extraordinary vessel for artistic invention. New York Magazine has written, “This indispensable theater offers more excitement per chair than any space in town.” Yet, behind the scenes the building has suffered from perennial electrical and plumbing failures and ongoing water damage, along with other problems that have cost Soho Rep tens of thousands of dollars yearly, disrupted technical rehearsals, and impacted quality of experience for casts and crews. It is not fully accessible, limiting Soho Rep’s ability to serve disabled audiences and artists. And the small scale of the building has been a mixed blessing: artists have made ever-changing creative use of the intimate space, but the seating limit has constrained the audiences that Soho Rep can reach.
 
Thus, Soho Rep has known for some time that 46 Walker Street could no longer meet the evolving needs of the organization and its community. A turning point arrived when the building changed hands from a single-building landlord to a corporate real estate holding company in 2022. Soho Rep Director Cynthia Flowers says, “Soho Rep is not a building: it is a constellation of values that have long governed its approach to an artist-centered, artist-led investigation of our collective humanity. The loss of a building can impact an organization adversely, but so can holding on to one for too long.”
 
In 2022, Flowers and then-Directors Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides began meeting with other theater organizations to explore possibilities for space sharing. When Hammons and Ting joined Flowers as Directors in 2023, they jumped into conversations with Playwrights Horizons and engaged in visioning sessions with multiple stakeholders including Soho Rep artists. In Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep found a peer who is committed to creative partnership and the opportunity to re-imagine how organizations can support each other in navigating the changing landscape of nonprofit theater in New York City.
 
Says Soho Rep Director Caleb Hammons, “As new leaders, this process helped us gain further clarity around the values that are the essence of Soho Rep: our commitments to artistic autonomy and risk-taking, affordable ticket prices, equitable and sustainable artist pay, and anti-racism on and off our stages. We aim to counter assumptions that the growth of an organization must somehow mean a de-evolution in radical, values-driven practice.”
 
Soho Rep’s productions in the 128-seat Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons will allow it to continue its commitment to big theater in small spaces — but now at a fully accessible space that offers stronger infrastructure in terms of theatrical equipment and basic amenities, with an audience capacity twice that of 46 Walker Street. Further, Soho Rep’s move into Playwrights Horizons connects the organization to new audiences who have not yet made it downtown, allowing Soho Rep to expand its audience base as it approaches its 50th anniversary in the 2025-26 season.
 
“This is a story of resilience in the face of displacement,” says Soho Rep Director Eric Ting. “What we needed most was to find a partnership that would allow us to preserve our identity and would also be generous and open-minded enough for us to explore what true organizational collaboration could offer — to Soho Rep, as we shape our future; to Playwrights Horizons; and to a theater industry in need of bold, supportive new models.” This collaboration will extend beyond the two organizations’ mutual commitment to new work, to include sharing best producing practices, developing non-traditional co-production models, in-house resource-sharing, and more.
 
Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Adam Greenfield says, “In its longtime home in Tribeca, Soho Rep has set off explosion after explosion after explosion, each new work blowing minds, opening up new passageways and terrain for theater to explore. It’s hard to fathom how much larger than its square footage 46 Walker Street became over time. As much as we’ll all miss walking into that cozy lobby — the faint smell of sawdust and paint, and the anticipation of what wondrous transformation the space will have undergone with each production — it’s too fun to imagine what’s in store for Soho Rep in its next home. And in the meantime, all of us at Playwrights Horizons are thrilled to become a part of this legendary theater’s story as we form a partnership through the transition.”
 
In the long term, Soho Rep aims to create a more permanent home — a place to hold, grow, and nurture its community. But for now, the theater also plans to produce in alternative venues and non-traditional spaces across New York City, as it explores what it means to be a civic institution.
 
Incoming Playwrights Horizons Managing Director Casey York, said, “This partnership is an exciting opportunity to deepen our already strong connection with Soho Rep, a treasured and crucial part of New York City's theatrical ecosystem. We look forward to expanding our community and learning from our colleagues in a spirit of abundance, as we believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. For decades Soho Rep has produced groundbreaking new work, and it’s our honor to host and collaborate with them as they chart their future."
 

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!

 
Before saying goodbye to 46 Walker Street, Soho Rep will produce one final production in the space: Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (October 23-December 1).
 
The world premiere work is a collaboration between two groundbreaking artists: Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana) — an inaugural Soho Rep Project Number One artist and downtown legend who “lights up New York’s performance venues with colorful, hilarious, and brain-twisting narratives” (Time Out New York) — and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the two-time Pulitzer finalist and Tony-winning playwright whose breakout An Octoroon premiered at Soho Rep in 2013. The production also reunites Jacobs-Jenkins with Soho Rep Director Eric Ting (The Comeuppance).
 
In this lecture/play/performance, Alina calls up her former student Branden to share some bad news: she’s killing off “Carmelita Tropicana,” the iconic performance persona that she’s lived and breathed for 30 years! Branden’s response is only one question: “How much for her?”
 
Thus begins Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! — part love letter to an iconic performance artist, part intergenerational debate about the legacy of “downtown” New York, part theatrical interrogation of the uses/abuses of nostalgia, real estate, “representation”, and the “avant-garde,” 100% fantastical journey in which Branden attempts to buy Carmelita Tropicana from her creator… but at what cost?
 
Tickets for Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! will go on sale in September.
 

Playwrights Horizons’ 2024-25 Season

Playwrights Horizons’ previously-announced 2024-25 season focuses on finding humanity and connection in isolating, disconnected times, with new work from Gabriel Kahane (Book of Travelers & Magnificent Bird, September 2024), Sarah Mantell (In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, presented in association with Breaking the Binary Theatre, October 2024),  Francesca D’Uva (This Is My Favorite Song, November 2024), Jordan Harrison (The Antiquities, co-produced with Vineyard Theatre and the Goodman Theatre, January 2025), and Ryan J. Haddad (Hold Me In the Water, April 2025), and the Spring 2025 co-production with Soho Rep to be announced at a later date. In intimate ensemble plays and expansive solo works alike, writers subvert and find new resonances in genre, expand our understandings of the theatrical form, and offer a counter-narrative to everything we hear repeated about an industry in turmoil: revealing the unstoppable ingenuity of artists and the exciting horizons for American theater.