Theatre for a New Audience Sets World Premiere Musical & More for 2024-25 Season
The season will feature work by Ethan Lipton, Wole Soyinka, and Taylor Mac, and works by William Shakespeare.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Aug. 09, 2024
Theatre for a New Audience has revealed its 2024-25 season, with American and world premieres of plays by Ethan Lipton, Wole Soyinka, and Taylor Mac, and works by William Shakespeare. Horowitz observes, “TFANA presents Shakespeare alongside some of the theatre’s most distinctive contemporary authors giving audiences the opportunity to experience the Bard interpreted with the same immediacy as plays written today.”
This season, TFANA also extends its reach far beyond New York as its production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Arin Arbus and first presented at Polonsky Shakespeare Center in 2022, tours to Scotland, January 18- February 15, 2025. The tour continues The Shakespeare Exchange, the transatlantic partnership between TFANA and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh. TFANA’sMerchant at the Lyceum follows the Lyceum’s production of Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (an undoing) at TFANA.
Merchant stars John Douglas Thompson as Shylock. Both Thompson and Arbus are TFANA Resident Artists. Merchant is the fifth collaboration between the two artists with Theatre for a New Audience and will be the Edinburgh debuts of Arbus, Thompson, and TFANA.
Though separated by two centuries, there is a link between John Douglas Thompson performing Shylock in Edinburgh in 2025 and Ira Aldridge, the first great American Shakespearean who left New York in 1824 to pursue a career as an actor in the United Kingdom. In May 1825, at age seventeen, Aldridge became the first Black actor to play the title role in Othello in the United Kingdom at London’s Royalty Theatre. It was a low-profile production, but Aldridge played Othello again in October 1825 at London’s Royal Coburg Theatre. From that performance he established a distinguished career as an actor in Britain, Europe, and Russia until his death in Poland in 1865.
In 1827, Aldridge first performed in Edinburgh and returned to Edinburgh in March 1833 as Othello. In 1831, for the first time in his career, Aldridge played Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in a production that premiered in Hull, England. Though he subsequently performed as Shylock throughout England, Ireland, Russia, and continental Europe, Aldridge did not play Shylock in Scotland in a full production of the entire play. Rather, he showcased selected scenes from The Merchant of Venice as well as Shakespeare’s Othello and Richard III.
John Douglas Thompson will be the first Black American actor in theatre history to play Shylock in Edinburgh in a full production at a major theatre when The Merchant of Venice plays at the Lyceum.
Prior to reprising Shylock at the Lyceum, Thompson will play Othello, opposite Juliet Rylance (McMafia, Perry Mason) as Desdemona and Will Keen (Wolf Hall) as Iago in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), directed by Tim Carroll (Artistic Director, Canada’s Shaw Festival and director Twelfth Night and Richard III featuring Mark Rylance).
Thompson and Rylance first played Othello and Desdemona opposite each other in TFANA’s 2009 award-winning production of Othellodirected by Arin Arbus. TFANA is thrilled that both extraordinary artists will again interpret these iconic roles in a completely new production for the RSC, October 11- November 23. TFANA has a rich history of collaborations with the RSC including when in 2001 TFANA became the first American theatre invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the RSC.
Back in Brooklyn, at Polonsky Shakespeare Center (262 Ashland Pl), TFANA’s 2024-25 season kicks off with the world premiere of a new musical, We Are Your Robots, with a book and lyrics by Obie-winning playwright Ethan Lipton (November 10–December 8, 2024). Two-time Tony nominee Leigh Silverman stages this work, with music composed and performed by Lipton, Vito Dieterle, Eben Levy, and Ian Riggs. Lipton and Silverman’s previous collaborations include three New York Times Critic’s Picks: the “delirious…wonderful” Tumacho, his “sly, grumpy and just delightful…sci-fi song cycle” The Outer Space, and his “immensely appealing” No Place to Go. In We Are Your Robots, Ethan Lipton & His Orchestra take on the roles of four robots exploring the relationship between humans and our machines.
Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts i and ii become a single play in Dakin Matthews’s adaptation. TFANA brings Matthews’s tightened and intensified version back to New York audiences (January 26–March 2, 2025) following a multiple Tony Award-winning production at Lincoln Center in 2003.
Awoye Timpo, who won the Directing Award at the 66th Obie Awards for her staging of Alice Childress’s Wedding Band for TFANA, returns to collaborating with the theatre for another seminal mid-century work—and one that, despite its resonances in our time, has yet to have its American premiere. From March 30–April 20, 2025, TFANA will present The Swamp Dwellers, the trenchant 1958 drama by legendary playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist Wole Soyinka.
Taylor Mac’s Prosperous Fools makes its world premiere with TFANA June 1–June 29. The MacArthur “genius” writes and stars in this contemporary comedy of manners inspired by Moliere’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Mac is beloved for cheekily maximalist performances like the 24-hour A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, deemed by Wesley Morris “one of the great experiences of [his] life” in The New York Times; as well as the “moving, witty, extravagant exercise in pure pleasure and spectacle” (The Guardian) Bark of Millions, which featured a song for every year of post-Stonewall queer history.
2024-25 Season Programming
We Are Your Robots
Book and Lyrics by Ethan Lipton
Music Composed and Performed by Ethan Lipton, Vito Dieterle, Eben Levy, and Ian Riggs
Directed by Leigh Silverman
A World Premiere Musical
Co-Production with Rattlestick Theater
November 10 – December 8, 2024
The season opens in Fall 2024 with the world premiere of a new musical, We Are Your Robots, by Obie-winning playwright Ethan Lipton (No Place to Go, Tumacho) and directed by two-time Tony nominee Leigh Silverman (Suffs, Violet). Co-produced with Rattlestick Theater, We Are Your Robots features text and songs by Lipton, and music by his bandmates of 20 years: Eben Levy on guitar, Vito Dieterle on saxophone, and Ian Riggs on bass. The quartet play robots who’ve come to the theatre to answer the question, “What do humans want from their machines?” With witty songs that are “twisted, dark and sophisticated both lyrically and musically, yet schleppy, sweet and sad all at once” (NPR), We Are Your Robots looks at brain mapping, consciousness, violence, surveillance, and the problem better known as being human.
Creative Capital Awardee 2023
Henry IV
By William Shakespeare
Adapted by Dakin Matthews
Directed by Eric Tucker
January 26 – March 2, 2025
Running time: 3:40 minutes with two intermissions
Dakin Matthews’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts i and ii into a single three-act play covering Bolingbroke’s turbulent reign was last produced in New York in 2003 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, where it won multiple Tony Awards as well as a special Drama Desk Award. In these beloved and gripping epic history plays from the 1590s, Shakespeare explores timeless questions about legitimate authority and how the private lives of rulers conflict with their public lives. A king beset with nagging doubts about his means of acquiring power frets over the dissolute habits of his wastrel son. Who will prove worthy? How is worthiness measured? No characters the Bard ever created are more vivid or indelible than the ones carousing, warring, sniping, and mercilessly tricking one another in these sweeping dramas about civil war. Director Eric Tucker is the artistic director of Bedlam theatre company, “the adventurously lo-fi theater troupe that has earned a reputation for joyfully reinvigorating classic texts.” (Sara Holdren, New YorkMagazine).
The Swamp Dwellers
By Wole Soyinka
Directed by Awoye Timpo
American Premiere
March 30 – April 20, 2025
In this rarely produced masterwork from 1958, Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka finds stunning universal resonance in a quietly tragic tale steeped in Yoruba myth and lore, set in a rustic hut in the Niger Delta. An aging couple living on chronically flooded land, awaiting one of their twin sons from the city, is visited by a complacent Yoruba holy man and a blind Muslim beggar who trigger a terrible crisis of faith and trust. Corrupt religion, family betrayal, environmental disaster, post-colonial exploitation, urban modernity encroaching on rural tradition: the themes of this searing and heartbreaking drama are both timeless and palpably contemporary. Director Awoye Timpo(Obie Award winner, Wedding Band) returns to collaborate with TFANA for another seminal mid-century work.
Prosperous Fools
Starring and Written by Taylor Mac
World Premiere
June 1 – June 29, 2025
Written by and starring the MacArthur genius and incomparable force of theatrical nature Taylor Mac, Prosperous Fools, inspired by Moliere’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, is a brilliant and courageous exploration of philanthropy and its hypocrisies; a retooled comedy of manners for an age with no manners.
The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh presents the
Theatre for a New Audience production of
The Merchant of Venice
by William Shakespeare
Featuring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock
Directed by Arin Arbus
January 18 – February 15, 2025
Shakespeare’s perennially contested play about corrosive bigotry and blinding vengeance is poised at the radioactive intersection of race, class and religion in Arin Arbus’s production. As Arbus observes, “The Merchant of Venice depicts a divided society saturated with hate and inequity. The world boils with anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, classism, and homophobia.” The show’s uniquely diverse company evoke a deeply stratified Venice. Its connections to our own grievously fractured world are vivid, stark and startling.
Season Subscriptions
Season subscriptions—with benefits including priority booking, flexible exchange policy, discounted guest tickets, discounts for the Book Kiosk in the Polonsky Shakespeare Center lobby, and more—are available online at tfana.org; by phone at (646) 553-3880; and in person at the box office.
2024-25 subscription packages:
Four-Play Package, $220 // $208 Early-Bird Special
We Are Your Robots, Henry IV, The Swamp Dwellers, Prosperous Fools
One ticket each to each show in the 2024-2025 season at just $55 per ticket
Subscribe with a four-play package by August 22 for even more savings at just $52 per ticket.
One ticket to three productions of your choosing at just $58 per ticket
A four-ticket package for just $60 per ticket. Use them in any combination for any of the shows in the 2024-2025 season.
**A $10 convenience fee will be added to all subscriptions. This fee covers all transactions associated with the subscription during the 2024-2025 season.
Subscriber add-ons include Guest Tickets for $60 and New Deal Tickets for $20. Subscriber New Deal tickets—for those aged 30 and under, and for full-time students of any age—are available for all performances for $20 and can be purchased in advance or day-of online, by phone, or at the box office with valid ID(s) required at pickup.
All sales are final. No refunds. All packages are subject to a $10 handling fee.
2024-25 Single Tickets
Full-price tickets are $90 and premium seats are $125. New Deal tickets— for those aged 30 and under, and for full-time students of any age—are available for all performances for $20 and can be purchased in advance or day-of online, by phone, or at the box office with valid ID(s) required at pickup. The calendar for every production this season will include one Sunday night Pay-What-You-Can performance. Audiences can purchase cash-only Pay-What-You-Can tickets at the door starting at 6:30pm that evening. Tickets are first come, first served, and limited to one ticket per patron. All productions, artists, and dates are subject to change.
Tickets for The Merchant of Venice at The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh are available at lyceum.org.uk
Comments
Videos