Vineyard Theatre Announces Spring Reading Series WORKS IN PROGRESS: FEARLESSLY MADE IN NEW YORK! 

Vineyard Theatre has announced Works In Progress: Fearlessly Made In New York!, a series of readings and conversations focusing on new works in various stages of development.  All will take place at Vineyard Theatre (108 E. 15th Street).

Works in Progress: Fearlessly Made in New York! will feature readings of five new works in development by Vineyard Theatre 2023-24 artists in residence, including recipients of the theatre's Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, Susan Stroman Directing Award, Colman Domingo Award, and Tow Foundation Residency. The series will culminate with an event on June 10th: Fearless Collaborations: Developing Theatrical Innovation. This stand alone event will include conversations between playwright Jordan Harrison and director David Cromer discussing the future of technology and theatre, as well as director and playwright Nazareth Hassan, with more panelists to be announced soon.  

Sarah Stern shares "We're excited to invite our community deeper into the process of creating new work at the Vineyard. We have extraordinary artists in residence this season, each with a unique voice, vision and process, and their new works range from intimate to epic, haunting to hilarious. Audiences are invited to hear these exciting new scripts as they're being made, and to stay for conversations with the artists about the path from idea to script to collaborating to hone their visions. Tickets for Works in Progress: Fearlessly Made in New York!, are free and open to all, so make your reservations early."

All readings are free and open to the public (releasing ticket access to members first). Tickets for Fearless Collaborations: Developing Theatrical Innovation are $20, and the event is free to all Vineyard Members. Please reserve tickets at https://vineyardtheatre.org/shows/wip-series/.

Tuesday, April 9 at 7 PM
NO NOTHING 

By T. Adamson 
Directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant

Middle-aged realtor Gwen lives with her dying mother, Martha, in rural East Texas. Isolated from the outside world thanks to a pandemic she only partly believes in, Gwen passes her time caring for Martha, throwing misshapen vases on a potter's wheel, and flirting with the family's gregarious yardman, Willie. But when Martha starts hallucinating conversations with a shadowy figure standing in the middle of a dark lake outside their home, both she and Gwen will be forced to confront the histories of resentment, despair, and racial violence that have brought their family to its wounded and codependent present. Could the stranger be an angel or a messenger from some other world? A family play featuring serpents, Arthurian legends, disembodied voices, and a malfunctioning robotic cat. 

T. Adamson is a Texas-raised writer and theater artist of Anglo/Mexican ancestry. T. has developed new work with Vineyard Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, NYTW, Great Plains Theater Commons, Clubbed Thumb, JACK, Cutting Ball, Mercury Store, and many others. Plays include The Natural Horse (Alleyway Theatre), The Straights (JACK), and Usus (Clubbed Thumb Winterworks). He is an alumnus of Fresh Ground Pepper's Playground Playgroup and Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers' Group. Awards include Irv Zarkower Award, Rita and Burton Goldberg Playwriting Prize, Maxim Mazumdar Award, a Falco/Steinman Commission from Playwrights Horizons, and the 2022-23 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award from Vineyard Theatre. Lecturer of Playwriting at Purchase College. MFA: Hunter College. 

Keenan Tyler Oliphant is a Theatre-maker and director from Cape Town, South Africa, whose work is in the lineage of Theatre-making and Storytelling traditions of Southern Africa. Selected directing credits include the Heather Christina's Terce: A Practical Breviary (HERE Arts); To the Ends of the Earth (JACK); Will You Come With Me? (PlayCo), Jay Stull's The Singularity Play (Harvard TDM); Sam Grabiner's People on Earth (Columbia University), Vivian Barnes' Intro To (Ensemble Stage Theatre), queen a queer ritual by Jay Stull (Dixon Place), Self-Combustion of a 30 Something Year Old... (New Ohio) Kyk Hoe Skyn Die Son [Look at How the Sun Shines] (Clubbed Thumb Winterworks) and developed work with NYTW and Ars Nova amongst others. Keenan is an alumnus of the Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellow (2020-2021) and the Drama League Directing Fellowship (2021-2022). MFA Columbia University.

Monday, April 15 at 7 PM
DWELLERS 

By a.k. payne 
Directed by Josiah Davis 

ABOUT DWELLERS
a ship churns against the Atlantic 
on the deck 
a chorus of 9 
try to reach the door of no return

a.k. payne (she/they) is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their plays love on and engage the interdependencies of Black pasts, presents and futures and seek to find/remember language that might move us towards our collective liberation(s). They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from the Yale School of Drama. Their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and a 2x finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She is the current recipient of the Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, National Black Theatre's I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency, the Kemp Powers Commission Fund for Black Playwrights and Atlantic Theater Company's Judith Champion Launch Commission. Their work has been developed with the National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theater Conference, and Manhattan Theater Club's "Groundworks Lab." They are a proud graduate of Pittsburgh Public Schools; grandchild of the Great Migration; descendant of a music teacher and a carpenter, who both march every year with their unions in Pittsburgh's Labor Day parade; a queer & non-binary abolitionist affected in community by the ‘New Jim Crow;” and of a great lineage of Black women storytellers and living-room archivists; all of which deeply informs, uplifts and amplifies their work as a playwright, community organizer and spacemaker.

Josiah Davis (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary artist. A director, choreographer, designer and actor, his work intersects expressive movement, live music, emerging technology, and ritual to breathe new life into storytelling. Asking, how do we create space for people to be in alignment while being pulled apart by invisible systems? He is a graduate from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, Television and Brown/Trinity MFA Directing 2020. He is a NYTW 2050 fellow, National Black Theatre Soul Directing Resident, Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellow, Susan Stroman Directing Award recipient, and Associate Artistic Director of On The Verge Theatre Festival in Santa Barbara. Selected credits: Mary Gets Hers (Playwrights Realm/MCC) Omar Offrendum's Little Syria (BAM), Lessons in Survival (Vineyard Theatre), Amani (Rattlestick/NBT), Clyde's (Alabama Shakespeare Festival/Arkansas Rep), Mr. Saturday Night (Broadway).

Monday, April 29 at 7 PM
PRACTICE

By Nazareth Hassan 
Directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant
 
ABOUT PRACTICE:

A theater company makes a play about itself. Practice explores what we each sacrifice to become a group.

Nazareth Hassan is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, writing, music, video, and photography. Recent performance works include Untitled (1-5) at The Shed (text published by 3 Hole Press), VANTABLACK at Theatretreffen Stuckemarkt in Berlin, Slow Mania 009 at Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, and Memory A at Museo Universitario del Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. Their first collection of poetry and photography Slow Mania will be published in 2025 by Futurepoem. They have released 4 singles, available on all platforms. They were the 2022 resident dramaturg at The Royal Court Theatre in London. They are a 2023-25 Jerome Hill artist fellow and the Tow Playwright in Residence at The Vineyard Theatre. They make work about love, anger, ambivalence, shame, and surveillance.
 
Keenan Tyler Oliphant is a Theatre-maker and director from Cape Town, South Africa, whose work is in the lineage of Theatre-making and Storytelling traditions of Southern Africa. Selected directing credits include the Heather Christina's Terce: A Practical Breviary (HERE Arts); To the Ends of the Earth (JACK); Will You Come With Me? (PlayCo), Jay Stull's The Singularity Play (Harvard TDM); Sam Grabiner's People on Earth (Columbia University), Vivian Barnes' Intro To (Ensemble Stage Theatre), queen a queer ritual by Jay Stull (Dixon Place), Self-Combustion of a 30 Something Year Old... (New Ohio) Kyk Hoe Skyn Die Son [Look at How the Sun Shines] (Clubbed Thumb Winterworks) and developed work with NYTW and Ars Nova amongst others. Keenan is an alumnus of the Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellow (2020-2021) and the Drama League Directing Fellowship (2021-2022). MFA Columbia University.

Monday, May 13 at 7 PM
THE HAUNTING AT CAMP WINONA 

By Mara Nelson-Greenberg 

ABOUT THE HAUNTING AT CAMP WINONA 
Camp Winona is anxious to be ranked number one by the American Camp Association this year, but they're running into some problems -- the buildings are falling apart, the campers won't stop screaming about death, and the Rich Girls Cabin has discovered there might be a ghost haunting the campgrounds. The Haunting At Camp Winona is a dark comedy that asks what it means to come of age in a messed up world where nobody gets out alive.

Mara Nelson-Greenberg's work has been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, SPACE on Ryder Farm, EST/Youngblood, Berkeley Rep, and ACT Theatre, among others. Her play Do You Feel Anger? premiered at the 2018 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville and was produced at the Vineyard Theatre in 2019. She is a former member of Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theater and Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers Group, and a recipient of the Vineyard Theatre's 2023 Paul Vogel Playwriting Award. She received her MFA from UC-San Diego under Naomi Iizuka.

Monday, May 20 at 7 PM
RISE AND BEINGS

By Rudi Goblen
Directed by Lamar Perry

ABOUT RISE AND BEINGS
Coco's dreams never lie, and she has been dreaming about the end. Now, her son Rice who supports the family is being derailed by a newfound love, and her daughter Naughty has gone missing. Rise and Beings is a modern day epic that spotlights how spatial [in]justice affects BIPOC communities.

Rudi Goblen a playwright, professor, and performer who creates solo theatre and devised theater work. As an acclaimed dancer, he has toured nationally, and internationally, competing, adjudicating, and teaching with his award-winning group Flipside Kings. Rudi is a recipient of the Vineyard Theatre's Colman Domingo Award: a three-time recipient of playwriting awards from the Kennedy Center, the Distinguished Achievement for the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, and an O'Neill Finalist; as well as a Future Aesthetics Artist Award, two Miami-Dade County Choreographer Awards; a FEAST Award for his book of poetry "A Bag of Halos and Horns," and a Theater Masters' Take Ten Playwright. He has trained and worked with Cirque De Soleil and DV8 Physical Theatre, and he is a founding member of Teo Castellanos/D-Projects and Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre. Publications include Theater Magazine, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, and Samuel French/Concord Theatricals. Rudi holds an MFA in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama where he was mentored by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Sarah Ruhl; and he is currently on faculty in the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Miami.

Lamar Perry (he/him/his) is a Director, Producer, and Educator hailing from Connecticut. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Directing at UC San Diego where he teaches Black Theatre History, Graduate & Undergraduate Directing, and Anti-Racism in directing. Perry previously served as Associate Producer at the Tony-award winning Old Globe and prior to his tenure in San Diego he was the Producing Associate at the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Up next he'll be directing Dead Girls Quinceanera by Phanesia Pharel in the UCSD Wagner New Play Festival. Recent directing credits include: The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Old Globe/USD Shiley), Thicker Than (UCSD Wagner New Play Festival), Animals Out of Paper (Chautauqua), and Mud Row (Detroit Public Theater). A nationally known new play development director Perry has developed work at; Roundabout, The Old Globe, the National Black eater, Cygnet, Blindspot Collective/La Jolla Playhouse, Signature Theatre, Diversionary, Chautauqua, Penumbra, and the O'Neill. He is an alum of St. John's University and the American Academy for Dramatic Arts. 

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