What's Happening!
-
SUMMERWORKS 2026 IS ALMOST HERE! MEET THE WRITERS & DIRECTORS
Our annual line-up of three brand-new plays is approaching, featuring: TITANS by Jesse Jae Hoon, directed by Tara Elliott; DERANGEMENTS by Nadja Leonhard-Hooper, directed by Annie Tippe; and THE FAMILY DOG by Bailey Williams, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad.
We’re thrilled to be working with a few old friends and a few new ones. Show information, casts and creative teams, and full performance schedules are coming soon – but you can secure your spot now, with a Summerworks Festival Pass!
-
SUMMERWORKS 2025'S SOLD-OUT CRITIC'S PICK COLD WAR CHOIR PRACTICE RETURNS
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. CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS & INFO
-
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!
-
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
-
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
-
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!
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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
There Once was a Child by Bailey Williams
The morning I started this essay I woke up early and looked at my phone. I really try not to look at my phone, particularly not first thing in the morning, for reasons that I don’t have to explain but usually fit somewhere in a convoluted Venn diagram called horror injustice fury. This morning the phone was a doozy. We’re at war with Iran, I calmly informed my partner as she blinked herself awake. Whyyyy? she groaned into the pillow.
Why, indeed. I’ve read a thousand articles by now and I’m no closer to understanding. Living in a globalized world is like being a kid again. It’s incomprehensible, overwhelming, and scary. There’s nothing you can really do about it except try to believe that you’re safe. War is something that happens to other people. Right?
It might not be clear based on this totally grim introduction, but Cold War Choir Practice is a fantastic romp, a cocktail of mood and movement and music decked in Soviet Santa Clause red. It’s a nostalgia stew of Christmas-time, the 1980s, childhood, spy thrillers, with an eerie relevance pulsing in the background. Is it the threat of nuclear war? A celebrity president with a fondness for inane, meme-able language? Or, perhaps more succinctly, how intimately personal and immediate geopolitical chaos can feel? Take your pick!
The play follows a precocious young girl named Meek, who lives with her father Smooch and her grandmother Puddin above an indoor roller rink in upstate New York. She’s worried about nuclear war, building a fall-out shelter after school the way other kids might build forts. Her choir leader tells her “the voice of a child can stop nuclear attack;” her dad wonders why she’s worried about Russians when “the FBI just bombed a bunch of Black folks in Philly.” Skating around and between this little family, we have our titular choir, who sing and play kids and Soviets and mysterious strangers (as well as, satisfyingly, toilet paper holders and doors).
We soon meet Meek’s uncle, Clay, a Black Republican working with the Reagan administration, much to the horror and shame of his family. He’s come upstate from DC to stash his “spooky-looking” wife, Virgie, away from the influence of Wellspring, a cult that promises “optimization.” Her arrival, plus the delivery of a Russian language Speak + Spell courtesy of Meek’s Soviet Pen Pal, trigger a Rube Goldberg-esque series of events leading to the untimely destruction (and Atomic Fireball fall-out) of Mr. Davis’ Candy Emporium… and also world peace. (For now.)
What we’re watching, ultimately, is a uniquely American coming-of-age story. When we first meet Meek, she tells us exactly what she wants. “A Pound Puppy, a Speak + Spell, and a nuclear radiation detector.” But it’s the last one that’s most important, because it represents safety and security, the two things every child deserves to have. By the end, however, Meek wants something different. She wants money, money to help fix the damage to her family’s roller rink. She’s learned the terrible lesson of America, that there’s only one currency here. It’s not peace or love or the power of children’s voices asking for safety and security. It’s the thing her father was trying to teach her from the beginning: the government’s not going to take care of you. They’ve got to look out for themselves.
At the end, Meek tells the story of Christmas. “There once was a child. A small child…” Of course, this is also her story, the story of a child who brought peace to the world (through light treason, pure nerve, and spy antics). It’s a nice idea, that one child can make the world anew. It’d be much nicer if they didn’t have to.