PlayCo Announces Productions Through Fall 2023, Including the World Premiere of 9 KINDS OF SILENCE & More

PlayCo has announced its programming through 2023-three plays that, in radically disparate styles, offer generous and probing explorations of human connection across the complexities of geopolitics, cultural identity, and elaborate workplace lunches. In its productions over the upcoming year, the company continues its presentation of vital international perspectives to New York theater audiences, with plays set in NYC, Ankara, and an unnamed authoritarian nation.

From October 6-November 5, PlayCo reteams with Ars Nova (with whom they also co-produced Sky Pony's 2016 hit The Wildness) to present Melis Aker's HOUND DOG, the Off-Broadway debut from the writer, actor and musician from Turkey who is now based in New York and London. Directed by Machel Ross with music by Aker and the Lazours, this cross-cultural jam-session-meets-play explores a winding path towards forgiveness and belonging as it tells the story of a young musician returning to Ankara from abroad to be with her widowed father.

Sarah Einspanier's Lunch Bunch, originally set for a Spring 2020 production and delayed due to the pandemic, will be presented March 15-April 16, 2023. Directed by Tara Ahmadinejad and commissioned by Clubbed Thumb, Lunch Bunch was developed and first produced in 2019 in Clubbed Thumb's Winterworks and Summerworks series, where it was hailed as an "excellent workplace comedy...at once a cry for help and a joyful, fizzy comedy of manners," bringing "lickety-split dialogue" and a "script [that] seem[s] almost like a piece of music" (Time Out New York) to seven public defenders' frenzied quest for the perfect lunch. Presented with Clubbed Thumb.

In September 2023, PlayCo will present a commission from acclaimed Bangalore and Abu Dhabi-based playwright and director Abhishek Majumdar, whose plays "rattle people" and "set [the] theatre ablaze" (The Guardian). His politically and emotionally vital works have been produced on stages across numerous countries, and translated into several languages. 9 Kinds of Silence, making its world premiere in PlayCo's production, surrounds two people who must communicate only using words and sounds approved by an unnamed oppressive state. This poignant and prismatic examination of the effects of nationalism and propaganda on everyday citizens challenges the values and limits of language by entering the silences that we accept and deny in a society.

PlayCo Founding Producer Kate Loewald says, "Alternately drawing upon music, stylized comedy, and the dramatic powers of silence, these three works each have such fresh ways of understanding human exchange in a world that's both highly fractured and deeply interconnected. It's a dream to be regularly presenting live theater again, to be able to look ahead to over a year of plans that will bring truly exhilarating writing to life for New York audiences."

2022-2023 Schedule and Play Descriptions

The World Premiere of

HOUND DOG

By Melis Aker

with Music & Lyrics by Melis Aker & the Lazours

Directed by Machel Ross

October 6 - November 5, 2022

Co-produced with Ars Nova

In Melis Aker's world premiere play HOUND DOG, a young musician returns from abroad to her hometown of Ankara, Turkey to look after her widowed father. Forced to reckon with the family and community she left behind, an investigation into her grieving parent's strange pilgrimage to Graceland unravels into a sonic mirage of memory packed with humor, nostalgia and the love we cultivate across generations. Directed by Machel Ross with music by Aker and the Lazours, this cross-cultural jam-session-meets-play explores the winding path towards forgiveness and belonging. HOUND DOG is co-produced with Ars Nova.

Melis Aker is a writer, actor, and musician from Turkey, based between London and New York, and recently named a "Women to Watch" by the Broadway Women's Fund. She currently has a series in development with Skybound Entertainment, and the upcoming London premiere of musical play Hundred Feet Tall with Benjamin Scheuer and Jemima Williams, adapted from their eponymous children's book. She will also be voicing a role in a new audio series from the creators of "Archive 81." Melis is the recipient of the Sundance Interdisciplinary Program grant and the New York Community Trust/Van Lier Fellowship. She has had writing commissioned by and developed at Atlantic Theatre Company (Middle East Mixfest), Ars Nova (Play Group member), New York Theatre Workshop (2050 fellow), Dramatists Guild (DGF fellow), The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center, National Alliance for Musical Theatre, Goodspeed, New Group, Roundabout Space Jam, LaMaMa, the Lark, Noor, Golden Thread Productions, 24 Hour Plays, Magic Theatre and BRICLab in the U.S., as well as the Finborough and Park theatres in the U.K.

Melis' screenplay ARI (Bee) was at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival as part of Maison des Scenaristes, and her series pilot for MANAR was selected for the Orchard Project's Episodic Lab, and IFP week. She has also worked on the development of a screenplay with Revelations Entertainment headed by Morgan Freeman. Her plays include: Hound Dog, Scraps and Things, Field, Awakening, Dragonflies, AZUL, When My Mama was a Hittite, Fractio Panis, Manar, 330 Pegasus: A Love Letter, Indigo Dreams, OPET Diaries, and Gilded Isle. She has taught at NYU, The New School, and King's College London. Education: King's College London (PhD), Columbia University (MFA), Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Acting), Tufts University (BA). Representation: CAA and Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

Machel Ross (she/her) is a Dominican American director and creative collaborator based in NYC, who specializes in the development of new work and aesthetic world building. Regardless of medium, she's invested in generating rigorous images, in support of framing stories to their fullest potential. She's developed work with Aziza Barnes (NANA), Agnes Borinsky (A Song of Songs) Daniella De Jesús (Mambo Sauce), Deaf West (T), PigPen Theatre Company (Phantom Folktales), Ellen Winter (This House Is your Home), and directed the world premiere of Jeremy O. Harris' Black Exhibition at The Bushwick Starr, where she is now the Associate Artistic Director. Machel is a 2022 Lily Award winner, a 2020-2022 WP Directing Fellow, a 2020 Sundance Theater Lab fellow, and a 2019 grant recipient of the Women's Fund for Film, TV and Theatre for her short film Signs He Made at Home. BFA-NYU Playwrights Horizons Theater School.

Daniel and Patrick Lazour are brothers and music theater writers. Their musical We Live in Cairo premiered at the American Repertory Theater in May 2019 directed by Taibi Magar. Their album Flap My Wings (Songs from We Live in Cairo) was recorded in quarantine and features the Lazours as well as major activist-songwriters from across the Arab world. Their new musical community project, Night Side Songs, about cancer treatment, patients and caretakers was workshopped at the Johnny Mercer Writers Colony at Goodspeed Theatre, Yaddo and is being developed with the American Repertory Theater and Harvard University. They are working with Ritesh Batra to adapt his film The Lunchbox for the stage, commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater. Their movie musical Challenger: An American Dream is about Teacher in Space Christa McAuliffe and the Reagan White House; and they are developing a 60-minute song titled Romulus & Remus, or How We Came to Live in the Festering Wound of the West. Patrick and Daniel were 2015-16 Dramatists Guild Fellows, MacDowell Fellows and are New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspects. They were artists-in- residence at the American University in Cairo and are teaching artists at Lincoln Center Theater.

PlayCo presents

Lunch Bunch

By Sarah Einspanier

Directed by Tara Ahmadinejad

March 15 - April 16, 2022

Presented with Clubbed Thumb

Dragon Fruit! Black Beluga Lentils! Perfectly Soft-Boiled Eggs! Amidst the distinct fear/feeling that the world is, always has been, always will be going to sh*t, seven public defenders seek meaning, belonging, and some semblance of order via their frenzied quest for the perfect lunch (bunch).

Sarah Einspanier's plays include Lunch Bunch (last seen in Clubbed Thumb's Winterworks and Summerworks; New York Times and Time Out Critic's Picks; in development for television with A24), House Plant (New York Theatre Workshop's Next Door; 'highbrow / brilliant' in New York Magazine's Approval Matrix; Lambda Literary Award Finalist), I LOVE SEAN (Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow), The Convent of Pleasure (Cherry Lane's Mentor Project), MADONNA col BAMBINO created with composer Deepali Gupta and director Caitlin Sullivan (Ars Nova's ANT Fest and the New Ohio's Ice Factory, curated by New Georges), Doctor De Soto and Other Stories by William Steig conceived by Miranda Haymon and co-written with Miranda Haymon and Seonjae Kim with music by Ellen Winter (upcoming tour TheaterWorksUSA), and I forgot to tell you (The Brooklyn Rail, June 2021 Issue). They have been a part of Ars Nova's Play Group, Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers' Group, and the New Georges Jam (former co-leader) and have been a resident at Millay Arts, the Hambidge Center, Sewanee Writers' Conference (Walter E. Dakin Fellow), Cape Cod Theatre Project (Noel Coward Foundation Writer in Residence), SPACE on Ryder Farm, the Mercury Store, and Erik Ehn's annual Texas Silent Writing Retreat. They teach at NYU Tisch, HB Studios, and the National Theater Institute.

Tara Ahmadinejad is a director and co-founder of the live arts collective Piehole (Jerome Finalist 2021). She has directed and co-authored boundary-pushing live art for theaters, galleries, and digital spaces, including collaborations with the LA-based Tender Claws in AR and VR: Tendar (Sundance 2018) and The Under Presents (Oculus, Sundance 2019, Emmy Finalist). Piehole's latest work Disclaimer (Drama League Award Nominee, NYC Women's Fund), also written/performed by Ahmadinejad, premiered at The Public's Under the Radar 2021. Other recent theater directing includes Daaimah Mubashshir's Emily Black is a Total Gift (Fisher Center at Bard College), Sarah Einspanier's Lunch Bunch (Clubbed Thumb), and digital collaborations with Satoko Ichihara (Japan Society), Eliza Bent (New Georges), Rinne Groff (Clubbed Thumb), and Scarlett Kim (Oregon Shakespeare Festival). NYTW Usual Suspect; New Georges Affiliated Artist; MFA in Directing, Columbia University.

PlayCo presents

The World Premiere of

9 Kinds of Silence

Written and directed by Abhishek Majumdar

September 2023

A poignant and prismatic examination of the effects of nationalism and propaganda on everyday citizens, 9 Kinds of Silence challenges the values and limits of language by entering the silences that we accept and deny in a society.

On the coast of a nation that has waged war for decades, an elder woman employed by the armed forces processes the reentry of a young man returning from the field. Allowed to communicate only via words and sounds approved by the state, how can a person returning from war describe their experience? How can someone who stayed behind explain what has changed while they were away? Together, they build a bed of silences to lead them towards truth.

Abhishek Majumdar is an Indian, multi-award winning playwright, scenographer,

essayist and director working in Theatre, Film, and Opera. He is the Artistic director of Bangalore based Nalanda Arts and is an Associate Professor in the Theatre program at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is also the co- founder and ex artistic director of the Indian Ensemble. He has worked at leading theaters around the world including The Royal Court Theatre, The National Theatre, Festival Internationale de Dramaturgia Buenos Aires, PlayCo, PEN World Voices, Ranga Shankara Bangalore, Prithvi Theatre Mumbai, Tibet Theatre, San Francisco Opera, and Deutsch Shauspielhaus Hamburg. He has worked in languages including Hindi, English, Urdu, Bangla, Tibetan, Czech, French, Kannada and Bangla. He is the author of Theatre Across Borders, a book on theatre making around the world which is featured as part of the Bloomsbury Theatre Makers series. His film Water Station is based on the eponymous play by Ohta Shogo and is to release in December 2022 at New York University Abu Dhabi.

New Artist Compensation Model

As part of their return to in-person production-first implemented last spring for the production of Ebru Nihan Celkan's Will You Come With Me?, directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant-PlayCo reset their organizational practices to better reflect the mission and lead with people-centered values, including a reimagined compensation model for artists that creates equity between staff and artist compensation and is based on estimates of a liveable wage in New York City.

PlayCo also added time to the production process to create rehearsal and tech schedules that center the well being of artists, crew, and technicians. This includes eliminating the prior 10 out of 12 hour technical rehearsal structure, implementing a 5-day rehearsal week instead of 6, and adding one week of rehearsal and one week of venue rental to the process to compensate for this new structure.

Please visit the PlayCo website for more details.

About PlayCo

PlayCo (Kate Loewald, Founding Producer and Robert G. Bradshaw, Executive Producer) is an Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway theater. PlayCo produces adventurous new plays from the U.S. and around the world, to advance a dynamic global experience of contemporary theater and expand the voices and perspectives represented on U.S. stages.

PlayCo has produced 40 new plays from the United States, Central and South America, Europe, Russia, South and East Asia, and the Middle East. PlayCo's distinctive international programming links American theatre with world theater, American artists with the global creative community, and American audiences with a whole world of plays. Previous productions include Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas' wry and wrenching Recent Alien Abductions, Lee Sunday Evans' New York Times Critics' Pick production of Stefano Massini's Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya, Amir Nizar Zuabi's This Is Who I Am and the sold-out Oh My Sweet Land, Guillermo Calderón's Villa, Christopher Chen's Caught (Obie Award for Playwriting, 2017), Maria Milisavljevic's Abyss, Kyle Jarrow & Lauren Worsham's The Wildness, Debbie Tucker Green's generations, Aya Ogawa's Ludic Proxy, Antonio Vega's Django in Pain and The Duchamp Syndrome, and more.

PlayCo's office space on the island known as Mannahatta (Manhattan), and the rehearsal and performance spaces we use throughout New York City are located in Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people.

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