Theatre for a New Audience Announces 2021-2022 Season

Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz today announced TFANA's 2021-2022 season of productions of plays by Shakespeare, Alice Childress, and Will Eno, and the residency of CLASSIX.

Says Horowitz, "When the pandemic began, Shakespeare scholar and author James Shapiro wrote me, 'We are back in 1606, in plague-ridden London, where pandemics closed the theatres. But it is good to remember that once the infection passed back then, people needed theatre more than ever, and flocked to it. TFANA and other companies will be playing a major role in helping us recover in the months and years to come.' After nineteen months of lockdown, I invite you to return to live theatre at TFANA's home, the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.

Whether written in the 16th, 20th, or 21st centuries, these plays by Shakespeare, Childress, and Eno speak to us now. It's also a great pleasure to announce the CLASSIX - Theatre for a New Audience Residency. Created by Awoye Timpo in collaboration with Brittany Bradford, A.J. Muhammad, Dominique Rider, and Arminda Thomas, CLASSIX explodes the classical canon through an exploration of Black performance history and dramatic works by Black writers "

The season opens with the New York premiere of Will Eno's Gnit (October 30 - November 21, 2021), a reimagining of Peer Gynt directed by Eno's frequent collaborator Oliver Butler that had four preview performances at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center before being shuttered due to the pandemic.

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (February 5 - March 4, 2022), directed by Arin Arbus and featuring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock leading a diverse company, began its life as an online exploration in January 2021 as part of TFANA's Artists & Community series, a new initiative exploring vital connections between the theatre and our world. The Spring 2022 presentation is a co-production with Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where it will travel after its TFANA debut.

The first New York revival since 1972 of acclaimed actor, novelist, and playwright Alice Childress's 1918-set interracial love story Wedding Band: A Love-Hate Story in Black and White, directed by Awoye Timpo, rounds out TFANA's season, April 23 - May 15, 2022.

Wedding Band marks the expansion of TFANA's collaboration with CLASSIX. In addition to the production of Wedding Band, CLASSIX and TFANA will also, this season, launch (re)clamation, a new podcast series covering different aspects of Black theatre history (release date forthcoming). The production and podcast are the result of a partnership between CLASSIX and TFANA that began with the February 2020 staged reading of Wedding Band.

HUMANITIES

All of the above productions offer free complementary humanities programming exploring the language and ideas of the authors and productions.

TFANA Talks: two post-performance conversations with artists and thinkers that take place during the run of each production.

360 Viewfinder: an online publication exploring each production.

Schedule & Details

Gnit

New York Premiere

By Will Eno

Directed by Oliver Butler

October 30 - November 21, 2021

Peter Gnit, a modern-day version of Ibsen's heroic character Peer Gynt, is a carefree young man on a reckless search for Experience and the True Self. Armed with tales from his mother of his early greatness and his absent father, he heads out into the world. Like all true stories of human endeavor and adventure, Gnit is part horror story, part fairy tale, and part road movie. A timely reckoning with received notions of Rugged Individualism and the self-made person. The play is performed with a 19-month break, filled with real-life tales of isolation, loss, courage, and love, and a 15-minute intermission. Come see how it all turns out.

The Merchant of Venice

By William Shakespeare

Featuring John Douglas Thompson

Directed by Arin Arbus

February 5 - March 4, 2022

A Co-Production with Shakespeare Theatre Company

Shakespeare's perennially contested play about corrosive bigotry and blinding vengeance is poised squarely at the radioactive intersection of race, class, and religion in Arin Arbus's production. John Douglas Thompson stars as the ill-used, vindictive money-lender Shylock in his fifth classical collaboration with Arbus. The show's uniquely diverse company and creative team evoke a deeply stratified Venice suffused with racism, misogyny, classism and homophobia, its connections to our own grievously fractured world vivid, stark and startling.

First New York Revival Since 1972

Wedding Band: A Love-Hate Story in Black and White

By Alice Childress

Directed by Awoye Timpo

April 23 - May 15, 2022

A Project of the CLASSIX-Theatre for a New Audience Residency

Set in the deep south at the end of World War I during the flu epidemic, Alice Childress's seldom-produced masterpiece is one of American drama's most mercilessly revealing tales of interracial love. A jewel of theatrical concision and detail, the play traces a devoted couple's caustic confrontations with anti-miscegenation laws, vicious family racism, community disapproval, a deadly disease, and their own long-buried feelings. Wedding Band, written in the heat of the Civil Rights era, speaks with stunning clarity to the public debates of the Black Lives Matter era. Awoye Timpo directs in her Theatre for a New Audience debut.

(re)clamation

A new podcast series covering different aspects of Black theatre history

Presented by TFANA

Produced by CLASSIX

Release date to be announced

(re)clamation is an intervention in the current conversation around theatre history. This free podcast from CLASSIX and Theatre for a New Audience recenters and uplifts the Black writers and storytellers of the American theatre--both the celebrated and the forgotten. Each act of the podcast will explore a different era or theme in Black theatre history through interviews, conversations, and excerpts of first-hand accounts. It will premiere on TFANA's web site and be available at no charge.

SUBSCRIPTION TICKETS

Flex Subscription Packages for the 2021-2022 season are on sale starting Tuesday, August 24. Two-ticket packages are available for $120; three-ticket packages for $180; four-ticket packages for $240. Subscribers may use their tickets in any combination for any of the shows this season.

TFANA will also continue its popular New Deal Program, which offers $20 tickets for the best available seats at all performances for all productions, for those age 30 and under or full-time students of any age. (Proof of age or full-time student status required.)

For more information on tickets and subscription packages, visit www.tfana.org or email tickets@TFANA.org.

TFANA'S HEALTH AND SAFETY PROTOCOLS

As they welcome you back to Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Theatre for a New Audience has put into place new health and safety protocols for the protection of their audiences, artists and employees. In light of evolving COVID-19 transmission rates, as well as government regulations and guidance from the CDC, their protocols are subject to updates. When attending their productions at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, please note your pre-show emails for any changes to these policies.

Theatre for a New Audience requires that all audience members be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 (a minimum of 14 days following final dose). Children 12 and under who are unable to receive the vaccine must attend with a vaccinated parent or guardian and must show proof of a negative COVID-19 test.

All Theatre for a New Audience employees are fully vaccinated and required to wear masks within Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Actors are also fully vaccinated, as required by Actors Equity Association and our own employment policies.

For information on vaccination policies and exemptions for medical or sincerely held religious beliefs, please contact safety@tfana.org.

Improvements at Polonsky Shakespeare Center

Indoor air quality and filtering has been enhanced by installation of an iWave ionization system throughout the facility. Freestanding HEPA filters are also used in the lobby and elevators as well as backstage and in dressing rooms. These improvements meet or exceed the standards set by public health officials and our theatrical unions.

They have enhanced their cleaning procedures, with sanitizing of all high-touch surfaces in the lobby and restrooms before and during each performance. Armrests and guardrails within the Mainstage are sanitized between performances. Assistive listening devices are sanitized before and after each use.

They will provide masks and hand sanitizer for all audience members.

A limited concessions menu will be available at Monica & Ali Wambold Food & Drink in their lobby. Eating and drinking is only allowed in the lobby area, or in the Arts Plaza located outside Polonsky Shakespeare Center. For the time being, no beverages are allowed in the Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage. Their concessions provider Sweet Hospitality Group has a fully-vaccinated staff and has put extensive protocols and procedures into place to ensure safe service. Their Front of House staff will scan tickets for contactless admission.

Box Office Policies

They ask that you stay home if you are not feeling well or are awaiting the results of a COVID test. Their Box office will be happy to exchange your tickets for another performance date or offer a full refund.

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