Playwrights Horizons Launches Resident Company Program with Clubbed Thumb

Playwrights Horizons today announced the launch of its new Resident Company program. As a writer's theater dedicated to the support and development of contemporary American playwrights, composers and lyricists and to the production of their new work, this new initiative will subsidize office, rehearsal and performance space for smaller theater companies who share an interest in American writers and who, like Playwrights Horizons, demonstrate a commitment to producing new plays. In the future, resident companies will also receive performance space in one of Playwrights Horizons' venues.

The lauded Clubbed Thumb (Maria Striar, Producing Artistic Director) will serve as the inaugural resident company in this effort to provide like-minded theater companies the space and resources to create more art, and expand their capacity to provide artistic opportunities to writers.

The vision for the Resident Company program arose from Playwrights Horizons' desire to expand the reach of support for new playwrights and plays and encourage more productions and wider audiences for new work. The program also seeks to lessen the financial burdens of renting costly rehearsal and performance space in the New York market. This initiative grew out of the organization's strategic planning process, and the theater company plans to expand the program eventually to incorporate three Resident Companies simultaneously. Each residency will last for a period of three years; Clubbed Thumb begins its formal residency this Fall. Subsequent Resident Companies will be announced in the months prior to their residency commencing.

"Playwrights Horizons can only continue to promote the most urgent, relevant new voices if New York's smaller new play producers and incubators remain healthy," says Adam Greenfield, Director of New Play Development at Playwrights Horizons. "We are proud to launch a program that we feel will strengthen our peer theaters and therefore the entire new plays ecosystem in which we all play a role. It was immediately clear to us that Clubbed Thumb should be the first Resident Company - there's a significant overlap in our roster of writers and a shared impulse to produce bold, risk-taking new works, as evidenced by our joint efforts around SuperLab, the play development series we launched together five years ago."

"On behalf of Clubbed Thumb and our extended artistic community, we want to express our profound gratitude for this thoughtful and generous initiative," adds Maria Striar. "In getting office and development space - and in the same place, which we've never experienced - we're re-capturing time and focus and gaining stability and resources, all of which we'll invest in our work and our artists. And what's more, the potential for new collaborations and projects is boundless. We are giddy at the prospect of hatching them."

Clubbed Thumb will be in residence through Summer 2018 at Playwrights Horizons' downtown location, 440 Lafayette Street. That space currently houses the Playwrights Horizons Theater School (PHTS, which is affiliated with NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, undergraduate Drama Program) and 440 Studios, Playwrights Horizons' space rental operation that provides hundreds of companies with rehearsal, classroom, and performance space. Resident Companies will work closely with PHTS to engage its students in their work and their new play development processes. Clubbed Thumb will receive a total of four years in residence, one year longer than subsequent companies, in order to help Playwrights Horizons test and implement the new program.

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