59E59 Theaters to Present Brits Off Broadway 2023 Season Featuring BREATHLESS, THE HABIT OF ART & More
The season will also feature Cecil Beaton’s Diaries, we were promised honey!, and more.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Feb. 28, 2023
59E59 Theaters has announced productions for the Brits Off Broadway 2023 Season, their annual celebration of U.K. theatre. The 2023 Brits Off Broadway Season is co-curated with the London-based New Diorama Theatre.
Brits Off Broadway has been running at 59E59 Theaters since 2004. New Diorama's previous productions at 59E59, including Secret Life of Humans, sold out at Brits Off Broadway. New Diorama previously co-curated the 2020 Brits Off Broadway Season, which was cancelled due to COVID-19.
The 59E59 Brits Off Broadway 2023 Season will begin with Breathless, presented by Theatre Royal Plymouth; followed by The Habit of Art, presented by Original Theatre; and Cecil Beaton's Diaries, presented by Evergreen Theatrical Productions.
The season will continue with we were promised honey!, presented by YESYESNONO Productions; followed by Orlando, presented by Jessie Anand Productions in association with BoonDog Theatre; and Being Mr. Wickham, presented by Original Theatre.
The season will conclude with Foxes, presented by Defibrillator and M. Green Productions; followed by Cassie and the Lights, presented by Patch of Blue, in association with New Diorama Theatre and Xinyi Shen for Verse Unbound; and the Bush Theatre production of Invisible, presented by Ameena Hamid Productions.
More information about the shows can be found below. For details regarding tickets and performance schedules, visit 59E59.org.
The 59E59 Theaters Brits Off Broadway 2023 Season will include:
Theatre Royal Plymouth presents
Breathless
By Laura Horton
Directed by Stephanie Kempson
Performed by Madeleine MacMahon
Theater C
Previews begin April 18
Opening Night is April 22
Limited run through May 7
What happens when the things we covet hide us from ourselves?
Opening up to new experiences in her late-thirties, Sophie is exploring long repressed sides of herself. When a secret she's keeping from those she loves, and even from herself, threatens to unravel it all, she must make a choice. Who or what will she decide to give up?
Breathless is a funny, honest, and stylish exploration of the knife-edge of hoarding, from the joy to the addiction and suffocating shame.
Originally supported by Pleasance as part of the Edinburgh National Partnerships.
Original Theatre presents
The Habit of Art
By Alan Bennett
Directed by Philip Franks
With Matthew Kelly, Stephen Boxer, Jessica Dennis, Robert Mountford, Veronica Roberts and John Wark
Theater A
Previews begin April 29
Opening Night is May 5
Limited run through May 28
Original Theatre (Caroline's Kitchen, Brits Off Broadway 2019; Invincible, Brits Off Broadway 2017) return to 59E59 Theaters with the US Premiere of The Habit of Art by one of Britain's most prolific playwrights Alan Bennett (The History Boys, The Madness of King George, and Talking Heads).
Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W.H. Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first for twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by, amongst others, their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station.
The Habit of Art looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. Exploring friendship, rivalry, and heartache this multi layered masterpiece examines the joy, pain, and emotional cost of creativity.
Evergreen Theatrical Productions Ltd presents
Cecil Beaton's Diaries
Adapted and Performed by Richard Stirling
Text © The Literary Executor of the late Sir Cecil Beaton
Used with Kind Permission of the Literary Executor of the late Cecil Beaton and Rupert Crew Limited
Theater B
Previews begin May 2
Opening Night is May 6
Limited run through May 21
For the first time, the diaries of photographer and designer Sir Cecil Beaton come to the stage to accompany his most iconic images of everyone from film stars like Marilyn Monroe to political figures like Winston Churchill. Beaton's photographs showed his versatility while his diaries exposed his inner turmoil. Not even his triumphant designs for My Fair Lady could quiet his restless mind and his passion for Greta Garbo was as complicated as it was powerful.
Blisteringly funny, with appearances ranging from the Queen Mother and Elizabeth Taylor to Audrey Hepburn and Truman Capote, the diaries paint a self-portrait of the 20th century's most compelling dandy.
we were promised honey!
Written and Performed by Sam Ward
Theater C
Previews begin May 9
Opening Night is May 12
Limited run through May 21
"The show that we're about to do is a story of the future. The story we're going to tell is the story of us. I'm going to tell you this now: it doesn't have a happy end."
A lone performer tells the story of the future of the audience; what's going to happen to them in the decades, centuries, millennia after the end of this show. There's a baby born in a lighthouse, there's someone on fire in the middle of the desert, there's two lovers reunited in a flooded city, there's a spaceship on the edge of a black hole. Everything has already been decided. This is the story of the end.
From multi-award-winning performance company YESYESNONO comes an act of communal storytelling. A hopeful, hopeless prophecy for earth and humankind. A story of us, our future, of paradise and how we get there in the end.
Orlando
Written and Performed by Lucy Roslyn
Directed by Josh Roche
Theater C
Previews begin May 23
Opening Night is May 27
Limited run through June 11
"I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another."
Lucy Roslyn's play is the story of a person looking for escape - just as Virginia Woolf imagined her own freedom in the pages of Orlando, a book which strains at the boundaries of identity: are we any one thing? Or are our selves "stacked like dinner plates," one on top of the other?
A new play that defies labels, directed by JMK Award winner Josh Roche and inspired by Virginia Woolf's legendary novel.
"Roslyn is a completely captivating and magnetic performer. There is... no chance to take your eyes off her - but you wouldn't want to even if you could." - Theatre Review Edinburgh
Original Theatre presents
Adrian Lukis in Being Mr. Wickham
Written by Adrian Lukis and Catherine Curzon
Directed by Guy Unsworth
Theater B
Previews begin May 25
Opening Night is May 31
Limited run through June 11
"Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his making friends - whether he may be equally capable of retaining them is less certain."
Mr. Wickham is ready to set the record straight.
Adrian Lukis, who starred in the renowned BBC TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, returns to the role of Mr. Wickham this spring.
Join Pride and Prejudice's most roguish gentleman, George Wickham, on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, to lift the sheets on what exactly happened thirty years from where we left him and discover his own version of some very famous literary events.
What really happened with Darcy? Were his feelings for Lizzie real? What about Georgina and Lydia?
Defibrillator and M. Green Productions present
Foxes
Written by Dexter Flanders
Directed by James Hillier
Theater A
Previews begin June 1
Opening Night is June 7
Limited run through July 2
If one kiss had the power to destroy everything, would you risk it?
Foxes follows Daniel, a young black man trying to keep up with his life in London's Caribbean community while balancing his own goals with his family's expectations. When his relationship with best friend Leon brings an unexpected change it creates turmoil, bringing a taboo into his family home that has the power to tear the closest and most loving relationships apart.
A deeply moving and complex story of family, community, and sexual identity, Foxes tackles the Black gay experience with tenderness and beautiful depth.
Full casting for Foxes will be announced at a later date.
Patch of Blue, in association with New Diorama Theatre and Xinyi Shen for Verse Unbound, presents
Cassie and the Lights
Written and Directed by Alex Howarth
With Alex Brain, Emily McGlynn, Michaela Murphy and Helen Chong
Theater B
Previews begin June 13
Opening Night is June 17
Limited run through July 2
Can kids be parents? Three sisters in foster care wrestle with that question as they try to write the next chapter in their story after important pages are torn out in this new play from Patch of Blue (We Live by the Sea, 2018).
Based on real life events and interviews with children in foster care, the show incorporates live music and video projection to transport audiences between the adult world and the at once more honest and more fantastical world of childhood, where much is mysterious but everything is possible.
Cassie and the Lights is a tender and playful examination of what makes a family and what holds it together.
Ameena Hamid Productions presents the Bush Theatre Production of
Invisible
Written and Performed by Nikhil Parmar
Directed by Georgia Green
Theater C
Previews begin June 13
Opening Night is June 18
Limited run through July 2
"No more quiet, no more model minority, no more wacky best friend. At least when we were the bad guys we existed."
Meet Zayan, an under-employed actor and over-employed dealer who sees himself as the hapless lead in the sitcom that is his life. Everyone else sees him as lazy, self-centered, and useless - if they even notice him at all. As Zayan attempts to transition from being neglected to being notorious, we see how a man whose brushes with oppression, grief, and the sneaking suspicion that he's become invisible have driven him to the unforgivable.
Invisible is a hilariously dark story tracking one man's desperate struggle to be seen as the hero of his own narrative.
A new Bush Theatre commission written and performed by Nikhil Parmar (Trollied).
ABOUT NEW DIORAMA THEATRE
New Diorama Theatre is a pioneering London studio theatre, home for the country's best independent theatre companies and ensembles. Since opening in 2010, New Diorama's work has received three prestigious Peter Brook Awards, seven OffWestEnd Awards, been named The Stage Fringe Theatre of The Year, OffWestEnd Artistic Director of the Year, won The Stage Innovation Prize and appeared in the Stage 100. Work commissioned and produced at NDT frequently tours nationally and internationally, including regular transfers Off-Broadway.
In 2021, New Diorama opened the revolutionary NDT Broadgate, a brand new 20,000 square foot rehearsal and development complex offered entirely free to thousands of independent artists to support post-Covid recovery. In 2022, NDT's premiere production of For Black Boys Who Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy transferred to The Royal Court Theatre Downstairs for an extended, sold-out run; while previous NDT commission Operation Mincemeat also announced a West End transfer, playing at the Fortune Theatre from March 2023.
Last year, New Diorama also won The Stage's 2022 Fringe Theatre of the Year Award, for the second time in the venue's short history."
ABOUT 59E59 Theaters
59E59 Theaters was established by the Elysabeth Kleinhans Theatrical Foundation in 2004 to grant professional space and expertise to non-profit theater companies premiering their work in New York City. Under the leadership of Val Day, Artistic Director, and Brian Beirne, Managing Director, 59E59 Theaters presents a year-round curated program of Off Broadway plays and musicals that are nurtured and supported through highly-subsidized rental rates as well as production, ticketing, FOH, marketing, and press support.
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