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Second Stage Announces Two New Plays, Featuring First Female Native American Playwright Produced on Broadway

These productions join the previously announced Broadway premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Pulitzer Prize-winner BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY.

By: Jun. 02, 2022
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Second Stage Announces Two New Plays, Featuring First Female Native American Playwright Produced on Broadway  Image

Second Stage Theater has announced two new productions for its upcoming 2022-23 Season.

Tony Award-nominee Bess Wohl will return to the Tony Kiser Theater (305 West 43rd Street) this Fall with the New York premiere of CAMP SIEGFRIED, directed by Tony Award-winner David Cromer. Spring 2023 will see the Broadway premiere of Larissa Fasthorse's THE THANKSGIVING PLAY, directed by Rachel Chavkin at the Hayes Theater (240 West 44th Street). With this production, Ms. FastHorse will be the first female Native American playwright produced on Broadway.

These productions join the previously announced Broadway premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis' Pulitzer Prize-winner BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY, directed by Austin Pendleton, which will run at the Hayes Theater this Fall. Additional programming for the season is to be announced.

"We are thrilled to add these two productions to Second Stage's upcoming season. Larissa Fasthorse's unique voice deserves to be heard on the Broadway stage and I'm very excited for her biting satire, The Thanksgiving Play, to have the larger audience it deserves," said Second Stage President and Artistic Director Carole Rothman. "Tony Award-nominee Bess Wohl has been part of the Second Stage family since 2014 when her play, American Hero, premiered in our Uptown Series. Since that debut, we've produced Bess' plays both on and off-Broadway and look forward to welcoming her back with this powerful two-hander. And we couldn't ask for more visionary directors to steer these productions - Rachel Chavkin and David Cromer are two of our finest directors and I can't wait for them to bring these two American plays to life next season."

Full Season Subscriptions are now available, starting at $355. "Choose your own" packages start at $210. To purchase a subscription, please visit 2ST.com or call 212-246-4422.

"FLIP THE SCRIPT" Subscriptions

In the spirit of welcoming new audiences, a subscription package, Flip the Script, is available to those ages 30 and under. Flip the Script subscribers have access to the full season for only $150. See 2st.com for details.

Second Stage Theater's programs are made possible by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

The Season is supported by a grant from the Howard Gilman Foundation.

More information on the season's productions is below:

CAMP SIEGFRIED - FALL 2022

New York Premiere at off-Broadway's Tony Kiser Theater

By Bess Wohl

Directed by David Cromer

From Tony Award® nominee Bess Wohl (Grand Horizons) comes an exhilarating new play about how far we'll go to belong. During a golden summer at the real-life Camp Siegfried, a picturesque campground on Long Island, two teenagers find themselves on a collision course with youthful passion and unbridled extremism. Are they falling in love or falling for something more sinister? Set on the cusp of World War II, this boy-meets-girl-meets-cautionary tale about the seductive nature of fascism reveals a shocking part of America's past and reminds us how easily darkness can sneak up on us.

Bess Wohl made her Broadway debut in 2019 with her play Grand Horizons, for which she received a Tony Award nomination. Other theatre includes Small Mouth Sounds - OCC Award, Make Believe - OCC Award, Continuity, American Hero, Barcelona, Touched, In, Cats Talk Back, Pretty Filthy. Her plays have been produced at theatres in New York, around the United States and internationally. Other awards include the Sam Norkin Special Drama Desk Award, the Georgia Engel Playwriting Award, a MacDowell Fellowship and inclusion on Hollywood's Black List of Best Screenplays. Wohl is an Associate Artist with The Civilians, an alumna of Ars Nova's Play Group, and holds new play commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club and Williamstown. She has also written for film/television, and is a graduate of Harvard and the Yale School of Drama.

David Cromer Broadway: The Sound Inside, The Band's Visit (Ethel Barrymore Theatre), Brighton Beach Memoirs, The House of Blue Leaves. Off Broadway: A Case for the Existence of God (Signature), A Prayer For the French Republic (MTC), The Treasurer (Playwrights Horizons), Man from Nebraska (Second Stage), The Band's Visit, Women or Nothing (Atlantic Theater), Really Really (MCC Theater), When the Rain Stops Falling, Nikolai and the Others (Lincoln Center Theater). At Barrow Street Theatre, he directed Tribes, The Effect, Orson's Shadow, Adding Machine (presented at the Minetta Lane) and Our Town.

THE THANKSGIVING PLAY - SPRING 2023

Broadway Premiere at Hayes Theater

By Larissa Fasthorse

Directed by Rachel Chavkin

Good intentions. Bad decisions. In Larissa Fasthorse's satirical comedy The Thanksgiving Play, a troupe of really well-meaning theater artists dream of creating something revolutionary: a culturally sensitive, totally inoffensive Thanksgiving school pageant that finally gives a voice to Native Americans. Finding said Native Americans... isn't so simple. And that's when things start to get absurd. Sending up a whole feast of social issues, this bitingly funny play roasts everything right, wrong, and woke in America.

Larissa Fasthorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation) is an award-winning writer and current MacArthur Fellow. The Thanksgiving Play (Playwrights Horizons/Geffen Playhouse), was one of the top ten most produced plays in America. She is the first Native American playwright on that list. Larissa is developing new plays with many theaters including Center Theatre Group, The Public Theater, Guthrie Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, and Yale Repertory Theatre. In 2019 Larissa re-entered film and television and has set up projects with Disney Channel, Freeform, NBC, Dreamworks, Netflix, and is writing on a series for Apple+ as well as adapting three beloved Broadway musicals. www.hoganhorsestudio.com

Rachel Chavkin (Director) is a director, writer and artistic director of Brooklyn-based collective, the TEAM. She won the Tony Award for her work on Hadestown (NYTW, National Theatre, London) which has been one of her greatest joys. She is a three-time Obie Winner, and received Tony and Lortel nominations, and a Drama Desk Award for Dave Malloy's Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway, Ars Nova, A.R.T.). London: Mission Drift (National Theatre), American Clock (Old Vic). Select New York and regional: Marco Ramirez's The Royale (LCT; Obie Award, Drama Desk and Lortel noms.), Malloy's Preludes (LCT3), Bess Wohl's Small Mouth Sounds (Ars Nova and national tour), Carson Kreitzer's and Matt Gould's Lempicka (Williamstown Theatre Festival), The Royal Family (Guthrie Theatre) and multiple collaborations with Taylor Mac. Her first short film, Remind Me, was an official selection of the Venice and Beverly Hills Film Festivals. 2017 Smithsonian Award for Ingenuity. Proud NYTW Usual Suspect and Member SDC.

BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY - FALL 2022

Broadway Premiere at Hayes Theater

By Stephen Adly Guirgis

Directed by Austin Pendleton

FALL 2022

City Hall is demanding more than his signature, the landlord wants him out, the liquor store is closed - and the Church won't leave him alone. For ex-cop and recent widower Walter "Pops" Washington and his recently paroled son Junior, the struggle to hold on to one of the last great rent stabilized apartments on Riverside Drive collides with old wounds, sketchy new houseguests and a final ultimatum in this Pulitzer Prize-winning dark comedy from Stephen Adly Guirgis. For Pops and Junior, it seems the Old Days are dead and gone - after a lifetime living Between Riverside and Crazy.

Stephen Adly Guirgis is a member of LAByrinth Theater Company. His award-winning plays include: Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, The Motherf**ker With The Hat, The Little Flower of East Orange, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Our Lady of 121st Street, Jesus Hopped The A Train, In Arabia We'd All Be Kings, Den Of Thieves, and Dominica The Fat Ugly Ho. He also wrote, produced, and co-created the Netflix series "The Get Down." As an actor he can be seen in Edward Norton's Motherless Brooklyn, Jason Chaet's Seneca, "Russian Doll" on Netflix, and Adam McKay's "Winning Time" on HBO.


Austin Pendleton is currently appearing on Broadway in Tracy Letts' The Minutes. Other Broadway appearances have been in Choir Boy (MTC), The Diary of Anne Frank (with Natalie Portman and Linda Lavin), Mike Nichols' revival of The Little Foxes, Hail Scrawdyke (for which, under the direction of Alan Arkin, he won the Clarence Derwent Award) and Fiddler on the Roof (in the original cast, as Motel, the Tailor). He has acted extensively off-Broadway too: The Last Sweet Days of Isaac (by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, the musical for which he won an Obie and a Drama Desk Award), Up from Paradise (the musical by Arthur Miller and Stanley Silverman), and many other shows, and off-off-Broadway, where he has played, for instance, "King Lear," "Richard the Third," and "Hamlet." He has acted in over 300 movies, and on TV in recurring roles in Oz, Homicide, and Law and Order. As a director, he has worked on Broadway (Tony nomination for directing The Little Foxes, starring Elizabeth Taylor), off-Broadway (several recent productions of Chekhov at CSC, including Three Sisters, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, for which he won an Obie, as well as Hamlet, starring Mr. Sarsgaard), and extensively in regional theaters, including the Williamstown Theatre Festival and Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, where he is a member of the Ensemble. He has written three plays (Orson's Shadow, Uncle Bob, Booth), all produced off-Broadway as well as extensively in regional theater and in Europe, as well as the libretto for A Minster's Wife, adapted from Shaw's play Candida and produced at Lincoln Center at the Newhouse Theater, as well as regionally. He teaches acting at HB Studio in New York City.

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ABOUT Second Stage Theater

Under the artistic direction of Carole Rothman, Second Stage Theater operates three New York City venues, exclusively dedicated to producing living American Playwrights. Second Stage's first season on Broadway at The Hayes Theater included Lobby Hero by Kenneth Lonergan, directed by Trip Cullman (Tony nominee for Best Revival of Play, Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role, Michael Cera and Brian Tyree Henry) and Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee and directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Among Second Stage's 180 productions are the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner Between Riverside and Crazy by Stephen Adly Guirgis; the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner Next to Normal by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey; the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegria Hudes; Mary Page Marlowe by Tracy Letts; The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown; Dogfight by Benj Pasek, Justin Paul and Peter Duchan; Dear Evan Hansen by Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, and Steven Levenson; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark by Lynn Nottage; Trust and Lonely, I'm Not by Paul Weitz; Grand Horizons by Bess Wohl; The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz; Everyday Rapture and Whorl Inside a Loop by Dick Scanlan and Sherie Rene Scott; Let Me Down Easy and Notes From the Field by Anna Deavere Smith; Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo; Torch Song by Harvey Fierstein; Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl; The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter Beane; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee by William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin; Jitney by August Wilson; Crowns by Regina Taylor; Saturday Night by Stephen Sondheim; Afterbirth: Kathy & Mo's Greatest Hits by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy; This Is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan; Coastal Disturbances by Tina Howe; A Soldier's Play by Charles Fuller; The Good Times Are Killing Me by Lynda Barry; and Tiny Alice and Peter and Jerry by Edward Albee.

The company's more than 150 citations include six 2017 Tony Awards for Dear Evan Hansen (Best Musical; Best Lead Actor in a Musical, Ben Platt; Best Featured Actress in a Musical, Rachel Bay Jones; Best Book of a Musical; Best Original Score; Best Orchestrations); the 2009 Tony Awards for Best Lead Actress in a Musical (Alice Ripley, Next to Normal), Best Score (Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, Next to Normal), and Best Orchestrations (Tom Kitt and Michael Starobin, Next to Normal); the 2007 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play (Julie White, The Little Dog Laughed); the 2005 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical (Rachel Sheinkin, ...Spelling Bee) and Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Dan Fogler, ...Spelling Bee); the 2002 Tony Award for Best Director of a Play (Mary Zimmerman for Metamorphoses); the 2002 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Body of Work, 29 Obie Awards, eight Outer Critics Circle Awards, three Clarence Derwent Awards, 13 Drama Desk Awards, nine Theatre World Awards, 20 Lucille Lortel Awards, the Drama Critics Circle Award and 23 AUDELCO Awards.

In 1999, Second Stage Theater opened The Tony Kiser Theater, its state-of-the-art, 296-seat theater, designed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. In 2002, Second Stage launched "Second Stage Theater Uptown" to showcase the work of up-and-coming artists at the 99-seat McGinn/Cazale Theater. The Theater supports artists through several programs that include residencies, fellowships and commissions, and engages students and community members through education and outreach programs. In 2018, Second Stage began producing at its 581 seat Broadway home, The Hayes Theater. Originally named "The Little Theater" and built in 1912, the city landmark has been remodeled by David Rockwell of Rockwell Group.





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