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
Grief Hotel (a theory of relativity)
by Sarah Lunnie
There was a moment in Tara Ahmadinejad’s production of Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel at Clubbed Thumb last summer that stopped my heart. In the middle of a scene I can only describe as genuinely sexy — this is rare, onstage, I think — Bruce McKenzie’s aging country-music star Asher Lowden, engaging in a touchless but improbably erotic exchange with Ana Nogueira’s Winn, suddenly made a shape with his body I’ve never seen onstage before. Then he disappeared backwards up the aisle of the theater. It was like watching a piece of cereal get sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.
I won’t say more about it, because a magic trick is so much better than a summary of one, and if you’re reading this not yet having seen it, why deprive you of your own discovery? I don’t mean “magic trick” in the literal sense, I mean this moment was a quiet marvel in a play full of them. Liza and Tara and this company have distilled, with great lightness, something so solid and so true about the experience of being alive on the planet — the repetition of loss — that I’m still carrying it around with me all these months later like a small polished stone.
It’s a comedy, sort of, in case I’m giving you the wrong impression! — you’ll laugh a lot, or I did — but you’ll have to trust me on that, because I’m just going to keep talking about death now. A woman you’ll meet called Aunt Bobbi has conceptualized the titular hotel and will spend the play pitching it to you: “You can go there if your sibling gets deathly sick, or if you find out that the person you love doesn’t love you back, or if you commit manslaughter, et cet-ra.” She’s got a throwaway line about “life-changing consequences for ordinary behaviors,” and damn if that wasn’t a throwing star right to my chest. What Bobbi understands, and what the play evokes so disarmingly, has something to do with the relationship between grief and agency, stolen or forsaken or misapplied or, most often, simply irrelevant. Sure, we all make mistakes, but sometimes you go to sleep and wake up again and the ground beneath your feet has rearranged itself. You’ve lost something essential, for no reason, and you can’t ever get it back. Agency, and time. Here’s another one from Bobbi, blazingly precise: “Even if you have some long story, loss is fast, and grief is slow.” Who among us hasn’t wished for “a more controlled experience of time”?
I was going to say something about karaoke to lighten the mood, but now I’m doing it again, depriving you of the pure pleasure I experienced watching these characters wrap their arms around each other and scream into the night. Spoiler alert: transcendence in surrender, in abandon. Just come, that’s all I really want to say, get thee to the Shiva. The universe of Grief Hotel is one you might recognize. Time is passing, you are aging, your new shower curtain is somehow already moldering, the food your partner (/be honest, you) left in the fridge is growing feet. People, including your partner (/be honest, you), behave badly and the physics of everything is unforgiving. Nothing you do matters at all, then you shut the door and someone dies. But you are here now, you’re alive, the sun rose this morning, you live in a world in which dogs also exist. You might yet be forgiven, though surely you don’t deserve it. You are not alone.
—Sarah Lunnie