Northern Stage to Present New Play SISTERS by Matthew Libby

 Northern Stage’s 2024/25 Season will open with Sisters, a new play by Matthew Libby, with performances from October 2 through 20, 2024 in the Byrne Theater at the Barrette Center for the Arts. The 2022 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Playwriting winner, Sisters by Matthew Libby, will be directed by Aileen Wen McGroddy, Co-Artistic Director of TUTA Theatre Chicago and Northern Stage’s former BOLD Resident Director (Sense and Sensibility). More information on Northern Stage's 2024/25 Season and subscriptions can be found HERE.

Single tickets are now available HERE. 

Told over the course of 90 years, Sisters tracks Matilda and Greta, a pair of sisters, growing up, learning from each other, dealing with responsibility and loss, fighting viciously, drifting apart, and eventually coming back together. They’re just like any other sisters except Greta is an artificially intelligent computer program. The production stars Jihan Haddad (Sense and Sensibility) as Matilda and Madeleine Barker as her AI sister, Greta. 

"Matthew Libby’s Sisters is a terrific piece of dramatic work that makes us think about the emotional dimensions of the intersection of lives and the digital,” said Dan Rockmore, director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College and a professor of math and computer science. In collaboration with Northern Stage, the Neukom Institute hosts the annual Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards for Playwriting, in search of full-length plays and other full-length works for the theater addressing the question “What does it mean to be a human in a computerized world?” After a successful 2023 workshop and staged reading at Dartmouth and Northern Stage, this fall’s production of Sisters represents the first fully realized production of this important new play.

Said Matthew Libby, “Northern Stage has been a tireless advocate and dream collaborator on Sisters for years now, and I am beyond thrilled to be working with them again to bring the play's first production to life in White River Junction this Fall. New play development can be a long and fickle process, especially on such a personal piece, so I feel lucky to have found a theater and creative team who are as excited as I am by the theatrical risks and big questions baked into this intimate, epic story. I truly can't wait for Northern Stage's audience to see it!”

Matthew Libby is a writer based in Brooklyn, by way of Los Angeles. His play DATA won the Kendeda Playwriting Award and will have its world premiere at Washington D.C.'s Arena Stage in fall 2024. He is a 2022-2023 Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow, Theater Masters Visionary Playwright, two-time Princess Grace finalist, and four-time O’Neill Playwrights Conference semifinalist, and his work has been developed by theaters including Roundabout, Alliance Theatre, New York Stage and Film, Pioneer Theatre Company, The Barrow Group, and others. 

A team of students and staff from the DALI (Digital Applied Learning and Innovation) Lab at Dartmouth will explore the intersection between AI and art by bringing Greta to “life” for Northern Stage audiences in the form of a bot in the lobby. This test model of “Greta” will be built and trained with dialogue and dramaturgical information from the play. Patrons will be able to interact with “Greta” as the model allows and tap into a fraction of Matilda’s perspective. 

"We are thrilled to expand our partnership with the Neukom Institute to include working with students from Dartmouth's DALI Lab,” said Northern Stage’s BOLD Associate Artistic Director Sarah Wansley. “This collaboration connects the story on our stage with the cutting-edge work happening in our community. We hope this project will make some of the technology explored in the play more tangible and relatable to our audience and help inspire the next generation of coders and inventors.”

The creative team for Sisters, led by McGroddy, includes Jennifer Fok (Lighting Designer), Tatiana Kahvegian (Scenic Designer), Alek Deva (Sound/Media Designer), Camilla Dely (Costume Designer), and Julia Egizio (Production Stage Manager). 

Sisters is made possible in part thanks to generous support from Dale Eickelman and show sponsor LaValley Building Supply.

Northern Stage’s 2024/25 Main Stage Season continues with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, running from November 20, 2024 - January 1, 2025. This romantic “tale as old as time” follows Belle, a passionate reader from a provincial town, and her unlikely captor, the Beast, who is really a Prince under an enchantress’s spell. Can the Beast earn Belle’s love before the last petal of the rose drops, or will he remain forever entrapped by the magic spell? Will this small town ever learn not to judge a book by its cover?

Northern Stage is supported in part by the Vermont Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Community Foundation, and the New Hampshire Community Foundation.

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