Work by Dominique Morisseau, Sarah Ruhl & Dave Malloy Set for Signature Theatre Winter/Spring 2024 Season

Signature Theatre has revealed its Winter/Spring 2024 season, with work from resident playwrights Dominique Morisseau, Sarah Ruhl, and Dave Malloy. By turns intimate and infinite, the works survey societal constraints, illuminate unexpected paths to transcendence, and offer expanded views of the originality of resident playwrights’ bodies of work. 

Signature Theatre Artistic Director Paige Evans says, “The works this season showcase the playwrights’ vibrant voices: Dominique Morisseau’s stinging social realism and multilayered character relationships in Sunset Baby; Sarah Ruhl’s theatrical upending of reality and time in Orlando; and Dave Malloy’s daring and darkly fanciful creativity in Three Houses.” 

The season begins with Sunset Baby (starting January 30), by Premiere Resident, Tony Award-nominee, and MacArthur Fellow Dominique Morisseau. This new production re-teams director Steve H. Broadnax III both with Morisseau (he directed the world-and-NY premieres of Blood at the Root) and with Signature (where he staged the world premiere production of Katori Hall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hot Wing King). 

Sunset Baby highlights the collision of ideological conviction with the complexities of everyday survival in this story of a Black revolutionary’s fraught reunion with his adult daughter.

Earlier this year, Spotlight Resident Sarah Ruhl’s world premiere Letters from Max, a ritual—an adaptation of the 2018 epistolary book Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship by Ruhl and Max Ritvo was presented.  In 2024, Signature presents another adaptation of Ruhl’s: Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf’s prescient novel (beginning April 2). 

Orlando further illuminates Ruhl’s ability to examine subjects as vast as mortality and gender with levity and wit—and to adapt books into dynamic theater. In this production, directed by recently-appointed Rattlestick Theatre Artistic Director Will Davis, Taylor Mac plays the era-hopping, gender-shifting protagonist. Mac is no stranger to time traveling and irreverently breaking open the constraints of historical norms and musty mores, as the visionary theater artist famously did in the universally acclaimed A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.

With his world premiere musical Three Houses (beginning April 30), Premiere Resident and Tony nominee Dave Malloy (Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812) theatricalizes pandemic isolation with searching beauty, surrealism, and humor. In his music, lyrics, and book, Malloy uses poetic imagery and a fanciful touch to explore the vacillating contradictions we have recently lived through: an experience communal yet solitary, familiar yet strange, life-affirming yet heartbreaking.

In Octet, the chamber choir musical that made its world premiere at Signature in a 2019 production, Malloy and director Annie Tippe explored the lives of eight internet addicts, immersed in an endless sea of information and phantasmal connection. Tippe returns for Three Houses, bringing to life a world where isolation has driven three people to the edges of their sanity; alone in the domestic spaces that cloister them, they search for meaning and connection in the objects that surround them, unlocking memories of their grandparents as they attempt to face their ancestral demons. 
Signature's Patron Program is the best opportunity to confirm your tickets to these exciting shows and support this ambitious season from Signature's resident playwrights. For more information, visit signaturetheatre.org/donate.  Additional season packages will be available this Thursday, June 15.

Signature Theatre Winter/Spring 2024 Season Play Descriptions

​​Dominique Morisseau’s Sunset Baby

Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III 

January 30–March 10, 2024

East New York, Brooklyn. Nina’s estranged father Kenyatta, a former Black revolutionary and political prisoner, reappears to obtain a coveted piece of her late Mother's legacy. While Kenyatta had visions of changing the world, his daughter became everything he feared. Now he’s at her mercy for his own redemption. This is a story about love, political action, and one woman’s journey from a brutal existence to her own liberation.

Dominique Morisseau is the author of The Detroit Project (A 3-Play Cycle): Skeleton Crew (Atlantic Theater Company), Paradise Blue(Signature Theatre), and Detroit ’67 (Public Theater, Classical Theatre of Harlem and NBT). Additional plays include: Pipeline (Lincoln Center Theatre), Sunset Baby (LAByrinth Theatre), Blood at the Root (National Black Theatre), and Follow Me To Nellie’s (Premiere Stages). She is also the TONY nominated book writer on the Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations (Imperial Theatre). TV/Film projects: She most recently served as Co-Producer on the Showtime series “Shameless.” She’s currently developing projects with Netflix, HBO, and A24, and wrote the film adaptation of the documentary STEP for Fox Searchlight. Awards include: Spirit of Detroit Award, PoNY Fellowship, Sky-Cooper Prize, TEER Trailblazer Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, Audelco Awards, NBFT August Wilson Playwriting Award, Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, OBIE Award (2), and the Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, named one of Variety’s Women of Impact for 2017-18 and a recipient of the 2018 MacArthur Genius Grant. 

​​Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando

Directed by Will Davis

April 2–May 12, 2024

Playwright Sarah Ruhl adapts Virginia Woolf’s Orlando—once called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” written by Woolf for her lover, Vita Sackville-West. Orlando’s adventures begin as a young man, when he serves as courtier to Queen Elizabeth. Through many centuries of living, he becomes a 20th-century woman, trying to sort out her existence. This theatrical, wild, fantastical trip through space, time, and gender features the one and only Taylor Mac in the title role.  

Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, essayist and poet. Her plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play; The Clean House; Passion Play;  Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Melancholy Play; For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday; The Oldest Boy; Stage Kiss; Dear Elizabeth; Eurydice;Orlando; Late: a cowboy song; and a translation of Three Sisters. She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony award nominee. Her plays have been produced on and Off-Broadway, around the country, and internationally where they have been translated into over fifteen languages. Recent: Letters from Max, a ritual, premiered at Signature Theatre, 2023; Becky Nurse of Salem premiered at Lincoln Center, 2022.

Dave Malloy’s Three Houses

Directed by Annie Tippe

April 30–June 9, 2024

Susan is in Latvia. Sadie is in New Mexico. Beckett is in Ireland. All three are alone; all three are haunted by their grandparents; all three hear the Big Bad Wolf scratching at the door. This world premiere musical from Dave Malloy brings three strangers together for a post-pandemic open mic night parable about magic, madness, and the end of the world. 

Dave Malloy is a composer/writer/performer/orchestrator. He has written music for sixteen musicals, including Moby-Dick, a four-part musical reckoning with Melville’s classic novel; Octet, a chamber choir musical about internet addiction; Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on a slice of Tolstoy’s War & Peace (12 Tony nominations, including Best Musical, Score, Book, and Orchestrations); Ghost Quartet, a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey; Preludes, a musical fantasia set in the hypnotized mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff; Little Bunny Foo Foo, a forest entertainment for small people; Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert’s “Winterreise”; Black Wizard/Blue Wizard, an escapist RPG fantasy; Beowulf—A Thousand Years of Baggage, an anti-academia rock opera; Beardo, a reinterpretation of the Rasputin myth; Sandwich, a musical about killing animals; and Clown Bible, Genesis to Revelation told through clowns. Other notable shows include All Hands, The Sewers, and (The 99-cent) Miss Saigon. He has won three Obie Awards, a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, a Drama Desk Award, a Lortel Award, a Theater World Award, the Richard Rodgers Award, an ASCAP New Horizons Award, and a Jonathan Larson Grant; has been a MacDowell fellow and Composer-in-Residence at Ars Nova; and is a Premiere Residency Writer at the Signature Theatre. Upcoming: The Witches at the National Theater in London, November 2023. He lives in New York. davemalloy.com [davemalloy.com]

About Signature Theatre

Signature Theatre is an artistic home for storytellers. By producing several plays from each Resident Writer, Signature continues its deep dive into their bodies of work.

Signature serves its mission by hosting distinctive resident playwrights and cultural communities at its permanent home at The Pershing Square Signature Center, a three-theater facility on West 42nd Street designed by Frank Gehry Architects. At the Center, which opened in January 2012, Signature continues its original Playwright-in-Residence model with Spotlight Residency (formerly Residency 1), an intensive exploration of a single writer’s body of work. The Premiere Residency (formerly Residency 5), the only program of its kind, supports playwrights as they build a body of work by guaranteeing each writer three productions over a five-year period. The Legacy Program, launched during Signature’s 10th Anniversary, invites writers from both residencies to premiere or restage earlier plays. Inaugurated in 2022, the LaunchPad Residency seeks to advance an early-career playwright's voice, body of work, and professional development. In 2020, Signature launched SigSpace, to bring free artistic programming to the Center’s public spaces and more fully activate Signature’s lobby as a free public workspace and social hub for New York artists.

The Pershing Square Signature Center is a major contribution to New York City’s cultural landscape. The Center supports and encourages collaboration among artists, cultural organizations and local communities by providing free, public access throughout the space. In addition to its three intimate theaters, the Center features a studio theater, a rehearsal studio and a public café, bar and bookstore.

Founded in 1991 by James Houghton, Signature Theatre is now led by Artistic Director Paige Evans and Executive Director Timothy J. McClimon. Signature’s Resident Playwrights include and have included: Edward Albee, Annie Baker, Lee Blessing, Martha Clarke, Will Eno, Horton Foote, María Irene Fornés, Athol Fugard, John Guare, Stephen Adly Guirgis, A.R. Gurney, Katori Hall, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Samuel D. Hunter, David Henry Hwang, Bill Irwin, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Adrienne Kennedy, Tony Kushner, Romulus Linney, Kenneth Lonergan, Dave Malloy, Charles Mee, Arthur Miller, Dominique Morisseau, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, Sam Shepard, Anna Deavere Smith, Regina Taylor, Paula Vogel, Naomi Wallace, August Wilson, Lanford Wilson, Lauren Yee, The Mad Ones, and members of the historic Negro Ensemble Company: Charles Fuller, Leslie Lee, and Samm-Art Williams.

Signature and its artists have been recognized with Tony Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, MacArthur “Genius” grants, and Lucille Lortel, Obie, Drama Desk, AUDELCO, and Artios Awards as well as the 50/50 Award for Gender Parity in Theatre, among many other distinctions. In 2014, Signature became the first New York City theater to receive the Regional Theatre Tony Award for its body of work and accomplishments as an institution. For more information, please visit signaturetheatre.org.

The groundbreaking Signature Access (formerly the Signature Ticket Initiative), which in 2019 celebrated its one millionth ticket sold, guarantees affordable tickets to every Signature production through 2032. Serving as a model for theaters and performing arts organizations across the country, the Initiative was founded in 2005 and is made possible, in part, by Lead Partner The Pershing Square Foundation.

Photo credit: Damu Malik, Gregory Costanzo, Matthew Murphy