Clubbed Thumb Announces Full Programming For 25th SUMMERWORKS Festival

Tony Award-nominated and five-time Obie Award-winning theater company Clubbed Thumb has announced the complete line-up for the rescheduled 25th SUMMERWORKS festival of new plays. SUMMERWORKS will run May 20 - July 2, 2022 at The Wild Project (195 East 3rd Street) and will feature productions of three new plays.

With its track record of discovering and supporting rising talent - in many cases, providing writers with their first production in New York or anywhere - SUMMERWORKS is one of the most eagerly anticipated theatrical offerings of the year.

"Summerworks is a joyful instrument of the theater, a well-calibrated mix of high ambitions and low risk," shared producing artistic director Maria Striar. "It's fun, intimate, cheap, social, scrappy, fast, warm, rigorous and informal, brave and weird. After the long, hard, painful slog of the last two years, I need this kind of theater right now, and I think others do, too."

The full SUMMERWORKS 2022 line-up includes:

California

Written by Trish Harnetiaux

Directed by Will Davis

May 20 - 31, 2022

A family road trip takes an unexpected turn when, in the dark of night, on the plains of eastern Oregon, Reality splits.

California was commissioned by Clubbed Thumb.

Trish Harnetiaux's plays have been developed with Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep (writer/director lab), Ars Nova (playgroup), MTC, The Orchard Project, New Georges (affiliate artist), the Mercury Store and more. In 2021, her short film You Wouldn't Understand was presented at Sundance Film Festival and her six-part narrative podcast The MS Phoenix Rising can be found on Playwrights Horizons Soundstage. She has been in residency at MacDowell, Millay, SPACE at Ryder Farm and Yaddo. Plays are available from Samuel French. MFA Brooklyn College.

Will Davis is a transgender director and choreographer focused on physically adventurous work for the stage. Off-Broadway credits include: Road Show (Encores! Off-Center); India Pale Ale (MTC); Bobbie Clearly (Roundabout Underground); Charm (MCC); Men on Boats (Clubbed Thumb and Playwrights Horizons-Lucille Lortel nomination); and Duat (Soho Rep). Regional credits include: Spamtown, USA (Children's Theater Company); Everybody (Shakespeare Theater Company); A Doll's House, Part 2 (Long Wharf Theatre); The Carpenter (The Alley Theatre); Colossal (Olney Theatre Center and Mixed Blood Theater-Helen Hayes award for best direction); Evita (Olney Theatre Center-Helen Hayes award nomination); and multiple productions for ATC in Chicago where Davis also served as artistic director. He is an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the NYTW 2050 Directing Fellowship, the Brooklyn Art Exchange's Artist in Residence program, and is currently a Princeton Arts Fellow.

Spindle Shuttle Needle

Written by Gab Reisman

Directed by Tamilla Woodard

June 6 - 16, 2022

In a cottage surrounded by an endless siege, at the dawn of Modern Capitalism, a motley group of women tell tales, pick nits, and stretch out the last bits of sustenance til the Market reopens.

Spindle Shuttle Needle is a winner of Clubbed Thumb's 2017 Biennial Commission.

Gab Reisman's plays explore the ways place writes itself on our bodies, sometimes using history as a prism to poke at current zeitgeist. Interested in the liminal and irreverently political, she examines what it means to sit on the doorstep of some big, uncertain change. Gab has developed work with Clubbed Thumb, Page 73, Fusebox, Sundance, and The Playwrights' Center among others. She's received commissions from Clubbed Thumb, the Humana Festival, EST/Sloan Project, the NOLA Project, New Plays at Barnard, and ZACH Theatre. Gab is a MacDowell Fellow, Orchard Project, Ingram New Works, I-73, and New Victory Lab alum and a former NNPN Playwright in Residence. Besides her own work, she builds immersive and devised performances in non-traditional spaces, most recently with the utopia-based trio Bender/Mars/Reisman. Gab splits her time between NYC and New Orleans, where she moonlights as a realtor named Gigi and is developing a new piece about Jewish identity, Miami real estate, and the porn industry.

Tamilla Woodard. Recently named one of 50 Women to Watch on Broadway, Tamilla Woodard is Chair of the Acting Program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University; the co-founder of the site specific international partnership, PopUP Theatrics; the current Artistic Advisor and former co-Artistic Director of the award-winning Working Theatre in New York; and was the Associate Director of the Tony Award-winning Hadestown on Broadway in its premier season. Prior to joining Working Theater, Tamilla was the BOLD Associate Artistic Director at WP Theater. Tamilla has directed at theaters nationally and internationally, including at WP Theater, Baltimore Center Stage, American Conservatory Theater, Classical Theater of Harlem, The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts with TheaterWorksUSA, and The Cleveland Public Theatre, among others. Recent highlights include Working: A Musical at the Alliance Theatre; the Lucille Lortel and Audelco-nominated world premiere of Donetta Lavinia Gray's Where We Stand at WP Theater and Baltimore Center Stage; the Drama League-nominated interactive digital production of American Dreams by Leila Buck for Working Theater in collaboration with ASU and 9 theaters and performing arts organizations across the country; Caryl Churchill's Top Girls at A.C.T.'s Geary Theatre; and the critically acclaimed immersive off-Broadway production of 3/Fifths by James Scruggs. Currently, Tamilla is represented online by the concert film Weightless by The Kilbanes (WP Theater); Where We Stand (Steppenwolf NOW); Theater for One's Here We Are series by Nicole Salter and DeLanna Studi; The Parsnip Ship and MCC's audio sci-fi This is Where We Go; and the audio drama The House of the Negro Insane by Terence Anthony, produced by the Contemporary American Theater Festival. Next up, Tamilla will head to the Guthrie to direct Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Sweat. Tamilla is a proud board member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, and is a recipient of the Josephine Abady Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women.

Bodies They Ritual

Written by Angela Hanks

Directed by Knud Adams

June 22 - July 2, 2022

A Santa Fe sweat lodge lets loose what's bottled up in a group of Texan ladies who have gathered for a birthday celebration. Will any of them taste that deep, deep spirituality only to be found in the American Southwest?

Bodies They Ritual is a winner of Clubbed Thumb's 2017 Biennial Commission.

Angela Hanks is a writer from Dallas, Texas. Her plays have been produced and developed at Clubbed Thumb, Dallas Theater Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theater, New Georges, Playwrights Horizons, among others. Wilder Gone, produced by Clubbed Thumb, was a New York Times Critic's Pick. Good Latimer, received its world premiere at Kitchen Dog Theater, in October 2021.

Knud Adams is a Brooklyn-based director of artful new plays. He recently directed the New York Times Critic's Pick English by Sanaz Toossi, co-produced by The Atlantic and Roundabout. His recent world-premieres also include: Paris by Eboni Booth (The Atlantic), The Headlands by Christopher Chen (LCT3), Notes on My Mother's Decline by Andy Bragen (Play Co), Tin Cat Shoes by Trish Harnetiaux (Clubbed Thumb), The Workshop by Torrey Townsend (Soft Focus), Asshole by Justin Kuritzkes (JACK), and Tom & Eliza by Celine Song (JACK). Knud is an alumnus of the Drama League Next Stage Residency and Fall Directing Fellowship, the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Playwrights Horizons Directing Residency, and Kenyon College. Next up: Private by Mona Pirnot (The Mosaic) www.knudadams.com.

Both Spindle Shuttle Needle and Bodies They Ritual return to SUMMERWORKS this year, after being previously scheduled to premiere during the 2020 festival.

Festival passes start at $55 and are on sale now at: https://ci.ovationtix.com/36616/store/packages.

Highlights from the previous 24 festivals include the NYC premieres of Gina Gionfriddo, Jordan Harrison, Lisa D'Amour, Jason Grote and Sarah Ruhl; professional debuts of Jaclyn Backhaus, Will Arbery, Clare Barron, Rinne Groff, Sylvan Oswald, Susan Stanton and Ariel Stess; and new works by Anne Washburn, Adam Bock, Gregory Moss, Jenny Schwartz, Ethan Lipton, Erin Courtney, Sheila Callaghan, Tanya Saracho, and Heidi Schreck. Many of these artists continue to make Clubbed Thumb an artistic home.

Past SUMMERWORKS directors include Pam MacKinnon, Lee Sunday Evans, Lear deBessonet, Anne Kauffman, Robert O'Hara, Davis McCallum, Leigh Silverman, and Ken Rus Schmoll.

Clubbed Thumb made its Broadway debut in 2019 with Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me, which premiered at the 2017 Summerworks festival, in partnership with True Love Productions. The play continues its national tour throughout 2022. Clubbed Thumb's second anthology, Unusual Stories, Unusually Told, was published in 2021 by Methuen Drama / Bloomsbury.

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