About Clubbed Thumb
Clubbed Thumb commissions, develops, and produces funny, strange, and provocative new plays by living American writers. Since its founding in 1996, the company has earned four OBIES and presented plays in every form of development, including over 60 full productions. Clubbed Thumb is an incubator for artists and their work, staging plays to critical acclaim while supporting an ever-growing creative community.
Our plays vary in style and content, but are always intermission-less, 90 minutes or under, and unproduced in New York City. They feature substantial and challenging roles for both men and women, are questioning, formally inventive, decidedly theatrical, and, somewhere in the text, they contain a sense of humor.
Clubbed Thumb is dedicated to supporting the work of emerging writers and does so by commissioning new work, offering a range of development programs, and most importantly, by mounting full productions. We provide every production — whether it run for a week or a month — with the resources to fully realize the particular world of the play. We value the community of artists that we have cultivated over the years, and we actively seek collaborations with new directors, and designers, hold regular open auditions and maintain an open submission policy for plays.
Every summer we present Summerworks, our annual festival of new plays and our cornerstone programming. Over the course of four weeks we produce an opening night of short pieces and three fully rehearsed, fully produced new plays. Every other winter we present a Long Run of a play that has gone through our various development programs, including Summerworks. Throughout the year we cultivate plays through readings, workshops specifically tailored to the unique needs of the play, and New Play Boot Camp, our intensive script revision program. Over the course of the two weeks of New Play Boot Camp, three playwrights produce three drafts a script, culminating in a reading of the work in progress. In addition to commissioning through organizations, in 2005 The Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission — a $15,000 prize to write and develop a play for Clubbed Thumb — was created to encourage the writing of plays that consider the relationships between truth, power, history, and personal responsibility. In the spring of 2007, Playscripts published Funny, Strange, Provocative: Seven Plays from Clubbed Thumb. Half of our plays are now in print.
The careers of writers nurtured by Clubbed Thumb (and whose New York premieres we've produced) are flourishing. Recent accolades include a MacArthur Award; a Tony Award; several Susan Smith Blackburn, Kesselring, Whiting and Obie Awards; the Pulitzer short-list; the Rosenthal New Play Prize; the National Theatre Critic's Steinberg Citation; grants and fellowships from the MAP Fund, Princess Grace, Jerome, McKnight, NYSCA and NEA/TCG; and numerous other residencies and commissions. Plays by Clubbed Thumb alumni are being produced, across country from L.A.'s Actors Gang to Actors Theatre of Louisville to New York's Playwrights Horizons and Broadway.
The company's core producers are Arne Jokela, Associate Diana Konopka, and Co-Directors Meg MacCary and Maria Striar.
Mailing Address:
312 East 23rd Street #4B
New York, NY 10010-4700
Information: 212-802-8007
Fax: 212-533-9286
Development Address:
141 East 3rd Street #11H
New York, NY 10009
info[at]clubbedthumb.org
Clubbed Thumb commissions, develops, and produces funny, strange, and provocative new plays. Since its founding in 1996, the company has earned four Obies and presented plays in every form of development, including over 60 full productions. Clubbed Thumb is an incubator for artists and their work, staging plays to critical acclaim while supporting an ever-growing creative community. The company's core producers are Arne Jokela, Associate Diana Konopka, and Co-Directors Meg MacCary and Maria Striar.