What's Happening!
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YOU'RE INVITED TO THE CLUBBED THUMB GALA
On Monday, October 6th 2025 at the Etsy Headquarters in DUMBO, Clubbed Thumb will be honoring Crystal Finn, Susannah Flood and Miriam Silverman.
These three actresses are at the very heart of what we do — as individual artists and as exemplars of their craft. Where would Clubbed Thumb be without actresses like them — and without these actresses specifically?
Crystal, Susannah and Miriam have been integral to our work for the last 15 years, and we are thrilled to announce we’ll be celebrating them at our gala this fall. CLICK FOR MORE
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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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APPLY TO CLUBBED THUMB'S 25/26 NEW PLAY DIRECTING FELLOWSHIP
New play directors who have worked at least three years outside of an educational setting, and who plan to be in NYC September 2025 through January 2026, are welcome to apply for the fellowship by completing the form HERE – applications due April 1st!
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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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NOW ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS FOR THE 10TH BIENNIAL COMMISSION
This year we lost one of our great comic dramatists: Christopher Durang. We’ve been reflecting on how powerful and much-needed savage humor like his is in a world like ours today. So, for the 10th Biennial Commission, please consider his work, especially from the 1980’s. Applications are due March 20th, 2025. Read more and submit yours HERE
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ANNOUNCING A RETURN ENGAGEMENT OF SUMMERWORKS 2023'S DEEP BLUE SOUND
We are thrilled to announce that Deep Blue Sound – which ran to sold-out houses at Summerworks 2023 – will return for five weeks this winter. After a wildly successful run of Grief Hotel earlier this season, we are excited to return to The Public Theater with another Summerworks hit. CLICK FOR TICKETS & INFO
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THANK YOU FOR MAKING OUR GALA SUCH A SUCCESS!
Monday night’s Gala, celebrating our dear friends and collaborators dots, was beautiful, moving and very fun. Thank you to everyone who attended, performed, volunteered, donated and otherwise supported this very special night.
See photos from the event on our Instagram (and tag @clubbedthumb if you’re posting your own)!
At the event, we raised funds in honor of dots to help us better support the designers in our community – and we happily exceeded our goal. But there’s no such thing as a late donation! If you’d like to contribute to the fund, click 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
