Spotlight: PIPELINE FESTIVAL at WP Theater

Five Weeks. Five Plays. One Lab. This is your chance to be the first to see the most exciting new works by the most brilliant artists in town! Festival artists regularly go on to be produced on the largest stages in the country and to win every award offered for the stage–you don’t want to miss your chance to see them here first! Shows run Thursday - Saturday with two performances on Friday (3pm & 8pm).

Drumroll for this year's festival line up:

Malicious Compliance (April 4 - 6)

Written by Amara Janae Brady, Directed by Julia Sirna-Frest, and Produced by Praycious Wilson-Gray Mo and Yuri sit under an almost non-existent potted tree named Beckett, waiting impatiently for the next phase of their career—the next part of their journey. Delores sings a song about the blood the land craves, a callous warning that the blood is the only thing that will allow them to ascend to the glory Mo and Yuri believe is possible. Inspired by Waiting for Godot, Malicious Compliance tells the story of two artists desperately waiting for a change that may cost more than they’re willing to give, or worse may never come.

O.K! (April 11 - 13)

Written by Christin Eve Cato, Directed by Jordana De La Cruz, and Produced by Barbara Samuels

It’s 90 minutes until curtain for the non-union, Latine, bilingual, production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, playing at a regional theater in Oklahoma when Melinda receives a call. The State has banned abortion and her upcoming appointment – canceled. With the performance approaching, the cast and crew band together (with some magical guidance!) to navigate a post-Roe America. Filled with tears, laughter and jokes that are just too soon, O.K! uncovers revelations about the company’s pasts, personal lives, and biases, and their relationship with a society desperate to discount their humanity.

Blackbirding (April 18 - 20)

Written by Queen Esther, Directed by Lorna Ventura, and Produced by Alverneq Lindsay Accompanied by banjoist/guitarist Ayodele Maatheru (Paradise Square, Shuffle Along, Lackawanna Blues)

Blackbirding – a solo show steeped in lost history, ephemera, ghost stories and folklore, storytelling and original reclamation driven Americana – is a requiem for America’s neverending Civil War and the promise of Reconstruction, tangled in a Southern Black feminist vernacular. When the Other Mary Celeste Sank: A Strange and

Umweltian Tale (April 25 - 27)

Written by Amina Henry, Directed by Ran Xia, and Produced by Emma Orme

WHEN THE OTHER MARY CELESTE SANK: AN UMWELTIAN TALE is an anachronistic, theatrical fairy tale: after a shipwreck in 1894, five women are marooned on an island and must work together to survive in a strange, new world. As they hunt for food, battle insects and each other, and occasionally relish their unmoored reality (goodbye corsets!!!), the women also begin to develop sharper senses of self.

The Cause (May 2 - 4)

Written by Else Went and Directed by Dina Vovsi

In this house of mirrors, a group of actors and a director gather at newly formed artist residency, The House Upstate, for a week-long workshop development of The Cause, a new play about a group of actors and a director who gather in a house upstate for a week to shoot The Cause, an experimental film adaptation of Othello. As daily rewrites from an absent playwright elevate coincidence to paranoia, jealousy and desire fill the rehearsal room thick as the nightly mist in this quiet, empty town.

To post a comment, you must register and login.