Atlantic Theater Company has announced that Amy Staats will be the 2017–2018 playwright-in-residence as well as the lineup for its upcoming Amplified Reading Series and two new commissions.
Actor and playwright Staats’ plays include Eddie and Dave, Hands, and I Hope She’ll Be Okay. During her residency, she will be integrated into Atlantic’s day-to-day operations and will receive a full production of a play at the Off-Broadway theatre.
Atlantic has also commissioned two new works via its Launch initiative to playwrights Abby Rosebrock and Tori Sampson. The Launch commission is awarded annually to early-career playwrights who have not yet received an Off-Broadway production.
This fall, Atlantic kicks off its Amplified Reading Series, which will present six new plays this year. The lineup features new plays by Eliza Bent, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Brian Watkins, Ghazi Albuliwi, Nina Segal, and Geraldine Inoa. The series is free; reservations can be made here.
See below for the full lineup, as outlined by Atlantic Theater Company:
On A Clear Day I Can See To Elba
By Eliza Bent
Directed by Knud Adams
October 3 at 2 PM at the Linda Gross Theater (336 West 20th Street)
Poetic, personal, and chock-full of puns, On a Clear Day I Can See to Elba takes on the solipsism of love, the maddening aspects of intimacy, and the curious nature of self-hood within a relationship. Lambrusco, Queen, and geraniums populate the ongoings in Bent’s two-hander. Elba ultimately asks: What is the nature of self-actualization within a couple?
Sovereignty
By Mary Kathryn Nagle
Directed by Molly Smith
November 20 at 12:30 PM at the Atlantic Stage 2, Studio A (330 West 16th Street)
Sarah Ridge Polson, a young Cherokee lawyer fighting to restore her Nation's jurisdiction, must confront the ever-present ghosts of her grandfathers. With shadows stretching from 1830s Cherokee Nation (now present-day Georgia) through Andrew Jackson’s Oval Office to the Cherokee Nation in present-day Oklahoma, Sovereignty asks how high the flames of anger can rise before they ultimately consume the truth.
Into The Earth With You
By Brian Watkins
Directed by Danya Taymor
December 11 at 2 PM at the Linda Gross Theater (336 West 20th Street)
Granddad is gone. No elegies. No dirges. No dowries. It all goes in the grave. But three sisters can't forget what's buried when an impossible discovery upends their notions of loss and gets the women asking: who among us has been digging? A burial play about the presence of absence, inspired by Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem “Dirge Without Music.”
Revelation
By Ghazi Albuliwi
Directed by Saheem Ali
December 19 at 2 PM at the Linda Gross Theater (336 West 20th Street)
Atheist. Metrosexual. Vegetarian. Recovering 12 step-programmer. Broadway musical star. Meet Sayed Al-Mansur. An Arab with a Jewish sense of humor. He’s just been deported to Islamistan for all the wrong reasons after a major terrorist attack. Now he must confront his past, present, and future in a repressive Islamic state ruled by a fanatical dictator. Will this neurotic New Yorker survive his exile and finish his newest musical about the Prophet Muhammad before it’s too late?
In The Night Time (Before The Sun Rises)
By Nina Segal
January 29, 2018 at 2 PM at the Atlantic Stage 2 (330 West 16th Street)
A baby cries. A bottle breaks. A window smashes. Over the course of a single night, a couple try to still their screaming infant – but as the hours grow longer, the world becomes elastic around them, and the horrors that scar our planet threaten to crash into the baby’s room. Should they ever have brought this child into such a wounded world?
Reckoning: Furies From A New Queer Nation
By Geraldine Inoa
Directed by David Mendizábal
March 19, 2018 at 2 PM at the Atlantic Stage 2 (330 West 16th Street)
2015: a year when the Supreme Court's landmark ruling on marriage equality coincided with a record number of trans women being murdered. Reckoning: Furies from a New Queer Nation examines two of the most pressing issues affecting Queer America today: gay white male privilege and the systemic oppression of trans women. Because when a Supreme Court ruling like marriage equality passes, we must ask: what did we accomplish and who did we leave behind?
For more information visit AtlanticTheater.org.
