PlayCo to Present Two Upcoming World Premieres From International Playwrights

PlayCo has shared details for two bracing future world premiere productions, and a revamped website linking audiences with its vital past as well as current feature articles and interviews. 9 Kinds of Silence, a PlayCo commission written and directed by Abhishek Majumdar, will run September 6–October 8, 2023 at 122CC’s Second Floor Theatre (150 First Ave). In January 2024, PlayCo and WP Theater will present their co-production of Corinne Jaber’s Munich Medea: Happy Family at WP Theater (4th floor, 2162, Broadway, New York), reuniting PlayCo with acclaimed director Lee Sunday Evans, who staged their productions of Christopher Chen’s Caught and Stefano Massini’s Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya.

9 Kinds of Silence is the latest work from celebrated 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, is set in a military tent on the shore of a country that is winding down a multi-year war. The play is the story of a Mother who works for the homeland on intake for returning soldiers, and a Son returning from combat. We don't know if they are mother and son, we don't know their political beliefs. We do know that they have to discover, over the course of one night, the language to describe to each other what they've seen in the years the war has raged on in the name of nationalism, and a dictator has arisen. 9 Kinds of Silence deals with sound and silence as means of protest, control, and subjugation. Majumdar explores our need, as nation states, to invent new enemies, and the extreme cost of nationalism that forces us to speak its language in a world where human silence is the last resort of authentic humanity.

Munich Medea: Happy Family surrounds two childhood friends, Caroline and Alice,

who reestablish contact after more than 20 years. As they begin to unravel shared memories, they discover the part that Caroline’s father, a renowned theatre actor, played in both their lives and how it affects them to this very day. Corinne Jaber's new play captures the wild vulnerability of youth and the heavy armature of adulthood in unsparing, theatrical detail, led by award-winning director Lee Sunday Evans (Oratorio for Living Things, Dance Nation, and at WP Theater: [PORTO], A Beautiful Day in November… ).

As PlayCo announces these upcoming works, its newly redesigned website likewise gives audiences a chance to explore the breadth of PlayCo’s body of work. Made with the generous support of the Howard Gilman Foundation and designed in collaboration with Manuel Miranda of Manuel Miranda Practice the website elevates and centers some of PlayCo’s most important values as a theatre company with its signature timeless, modern look. The new website features a robust archive of new plays from the United States and around the world that have premiered at PlayCo. Viewers can explore the organization’s body of work by play title, chronology, country of origin, and even artistic discipline, highlighting the contributions of hundreds of artists who have worked with PlayCo over twenty-plus years. The Hub, the digital component of PlayCo's work to foster a global conversation around theatre and artists, is a platform for interviews, features, and personal/critical perspectives from guest contributors and staff members.

About Abhishek Majumdar

Abhishek Majumdar, is a playwright, scenographer, and director working in theater, film, and opera in India and internationally. His work has been produced and commissioned in leading theaters around the world, including The Royal Court Theatre London, Prithvi Theatre Mumbai, Ranga Shankara Bangalore, Deutsch Shauspielhaus Hamburg, Ruhrfest Recklinghausen, Theatre Du Solleil Paris, National Theatre London, San Francisco Opera, the PEN World Voices Festival, Internacionale Dramatugie Festival Buenos Aires, and PlayCo. He is a recipient of awards including the International Theatremakers Award New York, Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Award Delhi, The Shankar Nag Rangakarmi Award Bangalore, the Toto Funds the Arts Award, Segal Center Award for Civic Engagement in the Arts, Best Director in London Movie Awards, Best Director  8 and 1/ film festival (Rome), amongst others. His book of essays, Theater Across Borders, is published by Bloomsbury International as part of the Theatermakers series. He has been published, performed, and translated in Hindi, English, French, German, Czech, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Kashmiri, and Spanish. He is the Artistic Director of Nalanda Arts Studio Bangalore and creative producer at New Voices Arts Project based in Bangalore.

He is also Associate Professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi and head of the Theater program.

About Corinne Jaber

Corinne Jaber is of Syrian/German heritage and was born in Munich and raised in Canada and Germany. She is an award-winning actress as well as a writer/director. She has been part of many international theatre productions in English as well as in French, such as – to name a few – Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata, A Dybbuk for 2, by and with the late Bruce Myers, Irina Brook’s Beast on the Moon (for which she obtained a “Molière” Best Actress Award in France), and more recently Oh My Sweet Land, a monologue which she conceived and co-authored together with Amir Nizar Zuabi, as well as acted in. For many years she has worked with Afghan actors in Kabul on Shakespeare. THeir work culminated in a production of Comedy of Errors at the Globe to Globe Festival for The Globe Theatre in London. Her play The Bus that Didn’t Stop on the Partition of India has now developed into her very first film, Borderlines, which she also produced and directed. She is currently in the process of post-production. Munich Medea: Happy Family, her most recent play, will premiere in New York in 2024.

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 42 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 Sarah Einspanier's acclaimed Lunch Bunch, Ebru Nihan Celkan's Will You Come With Me?, 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), 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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