What's Happening!
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SUMMERWORKS 2025'S SOLD-OUT CRITIC'S PICK COLD WAR CHOIR PRACTICE RETURNS FOR SIX WEEKS - TICKETS ON SALE NOW!
Tickets for Ro Reddick’s COLD WAR CHOIR PRACTICE are on sale now! The Summerworks 2025 Critic’s Pick, directed by Knud Adams, will return for an extended run co-produced by MCC Theater, Clubbed Thumb and Page 73. Friends of Clubbed Thumb have access to $45 tickets throughout the run – CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS & INFO
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MEET OUR NEW GROUP COHORTS!
A very warm welcome to the incoming writers and directors taking part in Clubbed Thumb’s Early-Career Writers’ Group and New Play Fellowship!
Directors Terrence I Mosley, Liz Peterson and Hanna Yurfest will work on newly commissioned plays by Max Mooney, jose sebastian alberdi and Emma Horwitz respectively – stay tuned for a Winterworks announcement.
And we’re looking forward to getting to know Alyssa Haddad-Chin, Doug Robinson, Dylan Guerra, Jan Rosenberg, Jen Diamond, Nadja Leonard-Hooper, Sarah Grace Goldman and Yulia Tsukerman in this year’s writers’ group!
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THANK YOU FOR MAKING OUR GALA A GREAT SUCCESS
Thanks to everyone who joined us to honor Crystal, Susannah, and Miriam, and to everyone who contributed to make it a truly special night.
We were moved by the warmth and generosity in the room on Monday October 6th — lots of hugs, laughter and a even few happy tears. These three are the real deal and we are lucky to know them; we’re excited to keep celebrating them and working with them for many years to come.
Actors are at the heart of what we do, and it’s not too late to support them with a gift to our 2025 gala! DONATE HERE
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THANK YOU FOR COMING TO SUMMERWORKS 2025
Whether it was your first Summerworks or your 28th, we are so pleased you could join us. CLICK HERE for some photos and essays from this season.
We’ll be spending the summer incubating and planning for the fall, but we have lot of news to share, so watch this space!
In the meantime, we’re pleased to announce that our outgoing board chair will match donations up to a total of $25,000 to support future remounts of Summerworks shows (like this season’s Deep Blue Sound). He wants us to keep it up – and so do we! CLICK HERE TO JOIN THAT EFFORT
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ANNOUNCING SUMMERWORKS 2025
Due to overwhelming demand, we’re adding performances this year – but Summerworks shows always sell out, so lock in your seats with a pass!
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THANK YOU FOR A GREAT RUN!
Spending the last two months with Deep Blue Sound has been a joy and a balm. We are deeply proud of the work, and humbled by the talent and dedication of this company of artists.
The show played for six sold-out weeks and we added as many shows as we could – but sadly, we closed this weekend. Thank you to the over 4,000 people who came to visit our island. And thank you to all the artists, staff, funders and friends who made it possible. This was a special one.
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NOW PLAYING: DEEP BLUE SOUND
Our “devastatingly beautiful” production from Summerworks 2023 returns for a limited engagement, in residence at the Public Theater. Now playing! CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS
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WINTERWORKS 2025 HAS COME TO A CLOSE
Thank you to the hundreds of people who joined as at Playwrights Downtown for the 10th annual Winterworks. We were so proud of the work these amazing artists made — and we managed to cram everyone in to share it. Congratulations especially to Directing Fellows Iris McCloughan, NJ Agwuna and Laura Dupper – read more HERE
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OUR NEW ANTHOLOGY - ON SALE NOW
We’ve been eager to put out a second anthology since Funny, Strange, Provocative was published in 2007, and the last year finally provided us with the time to take on this long-awaited project. We are thrilled to announce that Unusual Stories, Unusually Told, published by Bloomsbury/Methuen, is now available!
In it you’ll find seven Clubbed Thumb plays that span 18 years of our history, as well as essays and interviews about the work, and the often atypical processes that led to their productions.
Read more about the book and get your discounted copy (and our first anthology) HERE
A Note from the Author
T. Adamson
When I was a child- as a final ritual before tucking me in and turning off the light- my mom always led me through two bedtime prayers. The first was a prayer of protection/blessing for my friends and extended family. The second was a prayer of gratitude, thanking God for at least five good things that happened each day. I really enjoyed praying these prayers. Not only did they make me feel closer to God, they also made me feel closer to the people around me and to the good things that happened. They did, however, take a very long time to actually say.
As I got older, I started trying to speed through what I felt was the boring yet compulsory obligation of prayer by reciting a kind of meta-prayer that went: “Dear God, please say all my prayers for me. Thank you! Amen.” Eventually I phased out regular prayer entirely, and now I only pray sporadically, when I am overcome by pain or uncertainty or other emotions that feel too big to handle alone and/or too intimate to confide in another person. When I am compelled to pray now, my act of prayer is often accompanied by a series of thoughts that might be broken down like this:
-I need to pray very badly.
-Prayer is useless and does not do anything.
-Although I know that prayer is useless, I still feel the urge to pray anyway because I am convinced on some level that prayer does do something to the person praying. Prayer is, after all, a languaging of our internal conflicts and emotional landscapes which helps us to better understand ourselves and the complex network of forces we live within. In this way, the ritual of prayer resembles the ritual of theater, since both acts set aside spaces and times of exception during which the participants step away from life to more carefully examine it. Both acts, prayer and theater, trouble the unstable boundary between doing and not doing, between the useful and the useless, in order to bring those concepts into sharper clarity.
I always knew that prayer would be an essential part of Usus. Not only because it is an activity that fills much of the time in any monastery, but also because I imagined these monks as people for whom every moment of life is a kind of prayer- an ongoing search for goodness and authenticity in the face of doubt and ridicule. What compelled me about the Spiritual Franciscans was that they were people for whom it was insufficient merely to feel and profess a conviction, they were compelled live it. I was thrilled by the notion that the characters in this play would live through every moment of their lives in conversation with an invisible and silent scene-partner, benevolent yet mysterious, unceasingly remote yet all-seeing and ever-present. That they would be, to borrow a religious phrase, having an audience.
Thank you for being part of that audience. Blessings and gratitude <3 T.
See Usus at Summerworks – May 16 through May 28, 2024
