St. Ann’s Warehouse Unveils 2024-25 Season Featuring Five Premieres

St. Ann’s Warehouse has revealed programming for its 2024-25 season, a robust lineup of five new shows that mirror its vital presence in the international performing arts firmament. The institution celebrates its 45th anniversary year—its 10th in the theater it built on the water in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Internationally acclaimed artists and organizations for which St. Ann’s has created a New York home base will return, including Irish playwright-director Enda Walsh, with Anna Mullarkey, and Ireland’s Abbey Theatre; director Benedict Andrews, actress Nina Hoss, and London’s Donmar Warehouse; composer, pianist, conductor/bandleader Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra; and the Under the Radar Festival. St. Ann’s also welcomes new collaborators staging thrilling new works: Iranian playwright-director Amir Reza Koohestani and the inexhaustible Australian experimental theater collective Pony Cam. Additional programming will be announced soon.
 
St. Ann’s Warehouse Artistic Director Susan Feldman says, “Another great year of theater-making for New York audience—lots of variety and thoughtful innovation around new stories and unpredictable challenges. It’s always interesting (and fun!) to see the themes that emerge from the artists we embrace in our travels.”
 
The St. Ann’s Warehouse 45th anniversary season kicks off with a highlight of the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Burnout Paradise, November 12-December 1. The production, an international breakthrough for the young Australian collective Pony Cam, is a hilariously cathartic caricature of a painfully familiar experience: running ourselves ragged trying to get everything done. Burnout Paradise welcomes audiences with a simple wager: Can the show’s four performers meet a dizzying array of challenges while collectively running 20km on treadmills before their time runs out? They carry out absurd everyday activities to the point of exhaustion: from cooking a three-course meal, to shampooing their hair, to reciting Hamlet’s “To Be, or Not to Be.” The only way they can succeed is with the help of an enraptured audience cheering them on and helping them complete their tasks. If they fail—and, they often do—they offer audience members their money back.
 
Burnout Paradise is the latest in a rich history of thrilling Edinburgh hits that St. Ann’s has brought to New York, beginning with The National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch and including Yael Farber and her Mies Julie; Enda Walsh and his The Walworth Farce and New Electric Ballroom; Kae Tempest and their Brand New Ancients; Daniel Kitson, his masterful Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church, and numerous other works by him; and last season’s Life & Times of Michael K and Dark Noon.
 
This season, St. Ann’s continues to provide a platform for the wide, visionary arc of Brooklyn’s ubiquitous and beloved Arturo O’Farrill, whose free Fandango At The Wall—convening 30 musicians from the U.S., Mexico, and beyond in a poignant reminder of our national promise to embrace and welcome immigrants—St. Ann’s produced in Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2022, drawing an audience of over 5,000. In July 2024, O’Farrill returned to perform in Lara Downes’ Rhapsody for This Land: The American Odyssey in Music, another free, outdoor concert in the Park, produced by St. Ann’s and WNYC, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Gershwin’s exuberant American anthem Rhapsody in Blue. On December 14, O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra will perform the world premiere of Munodoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley, in tribute to the influential composer, pianist, organist, and bandleader Carla Bley, a frequent collaborator of O’Farrill who died in October 2023. Co-produced by Belongó, Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley features two new commissions: the first public performance of Blue Palestine, written by Bley for O’Farrill, and Mundoagua, commissioned by The Columbia School of the Arts in 2018 to commemorate the Year of Water. The program also includes Día de los Muertos, O'Farrill's musical meditation on the history and culture of the Aztec people. The performance brings audiences into the growing body of symphonic and orchestral work from O’Farrill, who has long been a leading figure in Afro Latin jazz.
 
St. Ann’s forges a momentous new collaboration—with Amir Reza Koohestani, his Mehr Theatre Group, and the award-winning New York-based company Waterwell (The Ford / Hill Project at The Public Theater)—in a work that, like Burnout Paradise, finds a wealth of meaning in an athletic act. Amir Reza Koohestani’s Blind Runner (January 4-19, 2025), performed in Farsi with English supertitles, follows a man whose activist wife—a political prisoner in Iran—impels him to help her friend, a blind woman currently training to run through the Channel Tunnel from France to the UK, in a dangerous feat that must end before the first train crosses the tunnel in the morning. This “mesmerizing” and “stunningly performed” work demonstrates “Koohestani’s classic ability to interweave the personal and the political” and “asks whether athleticism itself is potentially a form of protest” (The Guardian). Blind Runner is presented in partnership with Waterwell and Under the Radar, celebrating its 20th anniversary and its second year as a citywide event. Like last year, when St. Ann’s teamed up with Under the Radar to present Luke Murphy’s Volcano, the partnership between St. Ann’s and Under the Radar reunites two of New York’s unwavering supporters of international theater and celebrates the vitality of their overlapping histories and anniversaries: St. Ann’s hosted the first-ever Under the Radar Festival in 2005.
 
SAFE HOUSE (February 18 - March 2, 2025) continues St. Ann’s longtime championing of the singular work of Tony Award-winner Enda Walsh, whose haunting and visionary plays —
The Walworth Farce, New Electric Ballroom, Penelope, Arlington, Misterman, Ballyturk, Medicine, his adaptation/direction of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers—and first opera The Last Hotel have all been introduced on American soil at St. Ann’s Warehouse. In this production from The Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theater, Walsh teams up as lyricist and director with electronic-acoustic composer Anna Mullarkey. The exquisite performer Kate Gilmore plays the role of Grace. “A dazzling achievement…in the form of a song cycle” (The Guardian, in a five-star review), this “beautifully realized, multifaceted work” is an experience of “sensory envelopment through film imagery, orchestral composition, rippling sound design and Kate Gilmore’s stunning performance.” In Walsh’s own words: “I’ve never made anything like this before. It’s a brand new form for me. A song cycle. A theatre memory play. A cut up film. A gig. It’s not for me to say what it is really. It’s its own thing.”
 
The American Premiere of The Donmar Warehouse production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in a version written and directed by Benedict Andrews (March 26 - April 20, 2025) unites a number of artists who have crafted unforgettable theater at St. Ann’s through the years. Across the 2010s, the organization worked with the Donmar to bring to New York their visceral and virtuosic trilogy of all-female Shakespeare productions, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and featuring Dame Harriet Walter. In 2016, St. Ann's presented Benedict Andrews' raw, rotating vision of A Streetcar Named Desire (starring Gillian Anderson, Vanessa Kirby, and Ben Foster); his up-close, in-the-round Cherry Orchard “offers perfectly pitched comedy where other directors find somber tragedy” (The New York Times). The production stars Nina Hoss (Tár, Homeland), as Ranevskaya, returning to St. Ann’s following her unforgettable performance in the Schaubühne’s adaptation of Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, directed by Thomas Ostermeier; and BAFTA nominee and BAFTA Television Awards winner Adeel Akhtar as Lopakhin. Both were described as “tremendous” in a five-star Guardian review, while the Evening Standard, in another five-star review, called the production “revelatory… utterly captivating.” The Cherry Orchard at St Ann’s Warehouse coincides in part with Simon Stephens’ VANYA, starring Andrew Scott, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, making for a heady season of fresh interpretations of Chekhov, starring beloved international actors, in New York.
 

Tickets

Tickets for Burnout Paradise are on sale now.
 
Tickets for Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley, Blind Runner, and Safe House are on sale to St. Ann’s Warehouse now, and go on sale to the public on Monday, November 2.
 
The Cherry Orchard tickets go on sale to St. Ann’s Warehouse members on November 18, and to the public on November 21.
 
Memberships and tickets can be purchased at stannswarehouse.org.
 

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