WP Theater Reveals 2024 Lineup for The Pipeline Festival

WP Theater has revealed the 2024 lineup for The Pipeline Festival, the fifth biennial showcase of the artists in its celebrated WP Lab for playwrights, directors, and producers. Returning from April 4 – May 4, 2024, at WP Theater, the festival is the culmination of the renowned two-year WP Lab residency, providing a unique opportunity for audiences to see five new works in various stages of development, ranging from staged readings to full-length workshop productions – presented over a span of several weeks.
 
The Festival, true to its name, serves as a pipeline to funnel the work of talented Women+ artists to the forefront of American theater. Each play is created and produced by collaborative writer/director/producer teams from the WP Lab residency program.
 
The 2022-2024 WP Lab artists are: 
PLAYWRIGHTS: Amara Janae Brady (she/they), Christin Eve Cato, Queen Esther (she/her), Amina Henry (she/her), Else Went (they/she)
 
DIRECTORS: Jordana De La Cruz (she/they), Julia Sirna-Frest (she/her), Lorna Ventura, Dina Vovsi (she/her), Ran Xia (she/her)
 
PRODUCERS: Alvernq Lindsay (she/her), Emma Orme (she/her), Barbara Samuels (she/her), Praycious Wilson-Gay (she/her)
 
The WP Playwrights Lab is led by WP Producing Artistic Director Lisa McNulty and Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence Cori Thomas; the Directors Lab is led by Rebecca Martínez (Cohort Collaborations Director for One Nation/One Project, director of WP’s Sancocho, Bite Me), and Nicole A. Watson (Artistic Director, The Playwrights Center); and the Producers Lab is led by two-time Tony Award Winning producer Sally Cade Holmes and INTAR Producing Director Nidia Medina.
 
Previous Festival works have included Pulitzer Prize recipient Martyna Majok’s queens (subsequently produced at LCT3), Sarah Burgess’ Kings (produced at The Public Theater), Sylvia Khoury’s Power Strip (produced at LCT3), and Jonathan Larson Grant recipients Zoe Sarnak and Emily Kaczmarek’s Afloat. 
 
Tickets for The Pipeline Festival are now on sale via WPTHEATER.ORG. Festival passes for all five productions are available for $60 and individual tickets can be purchased for either $10 or $30 - choose your price. Festival Pass purchasers will receive a punch card for the duration of the festival and a special gift when they see all five shows. The performance schedule is as follows: Thursday at 7:00pm, Friday at 3:00pm & 8:00pm, and Saturday at 8:00pm. 

WEEK 1: APRIL 4 - 6

MALICIOUS COMPLIANCE

By Amara Janae Brady
Directed by Julia Sirna-Frest
Produced by Praycious Wilson-Gay
 
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.
 
WEEK 2: APRIL 11-13

OK

By: Christin Eve Cato
Directed by: Jordana De La Cruz
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, OK! uncovers revelations about the company’s pasts, personal lives, and biases, and their relationship with a society desperate to discount their humanity.

 
WEEK 3: APRIL 18-20

BLACKBIRDING

By: Queen Esther
Directed by: Lorna Ventura
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.
 
WEEK 4: APRIL 25 – April 27

WHEN THE OTHER MARY CELESTE SANK: A STRANGE AND UMWELTIAN TALE

By: Amina Henry
Directed by: Ran Xia
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.
 
WEEK 5: MAY 2 - 4

THE CAUSE

By: Else Went
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.
 

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