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
Why do people go to little coffee shops? by Gracie Gardner
Why do people go to little coffee shops?
To savor a morning ritual? To support a local business? To experience community?
Or is it to approximate closeness with someone who is trapped behind a counter and cannot leave? To have a pretend mommy who gives you sweet foamy milk in a see-through cup? Is it so you can order someone around first thing in the morning? And they have to do what you say because their livelihood depends on it? Do you need to practice holding power over someone else before your day can really start?
Milo’s play Business Ideas studies the vulnerability of service work with the measured pressure of an espresso tamper compacting coffee grounds into a puck. Despite being set in a coffee shop, the stage directions never actually mention the exchange of coffee for money. That’s sort of besides the point. What they’re really buying is a brief moment of being perceived as important. If they don’t get this, they’re dissatisfied. When one customer becomes impossibly particular about an order, there is no way to get it right, the barista Patty grits through her teeth: “I really want. To make it perfect for you.”
When I was a barista, I tended to register those long winding orders as a cry for help. A coffee order can go on so long it turns into emotional transference. Do people who are in a rush know they can make coffee at a pace of their discretion from the convenience of their own homes? Another customer, who claims to be a surgeon, takes it to Yelp: “Because coffee was given to me slowly, a woman died.” Later, Patty worries: “I somehow have not been told the secret… that everyone else has been told.”
She isn’t the only one. At a table in the cafe, the titular Business Ideas are being frothed up by a recently laid-off mother and her college-bound daughter, doomily brainstorming a Shark-worthy plan to raise tuition funds. Every proposal mom makes has mom extracting labor from her daughter, compromising her morals, or confusing hard work with access to capital. They circle around solutions to invented problems, but get jammed up in the execution. Nothing is viable. The closest they get to something they could actually accomplish is by rebranding things that already exist. Mom pitches: “everyone ‘has’ artichoke. but only our artichoke. Means sex.”
In the world of Business Ideas, the people in power are unknowable and nameless. Parent and child are business associates. And Patty is $80,000 in student debt and working for minimum wage. It’s a play that captures that queasy catch-22 of Milo’s generation: they graduated from college at a time when entry level positions required years of experience, downstream of boomers refusing to retire because they linked their value to their productivity, and media outlets blamed their financial precarity on their coffee habits.
But really… What a bargain is five dollars to be in charge of something for a change? Even if it’s just a tiny baby cup of espresso? To indulge in a ridiculously exacting request of what you want? Will you be ready to face the indignity of your day ahead as soon you get your large cup of warm sugary milk?