Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot will be revived as part of TFANA's 2023-24 season with Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks leading the cast.
Shannon and Sparks will star as Estragon and Vladimir, respectively. Joining them in the Arin Arbus-directed production will be Jeffrey Biehl as Lucky and Ajay Naidu as Pozzo. Vladimir and Estragno are down on their luck but always keep their meetings with Godot, a figure who promises deliverance—but never shows up. Performances of this play about rootlessness and uncertainty will run November 4-December 3.
With Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, TFANA will present Soho Rep and the NAATCO National Partnership Project's Public Obscenities written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury. The previously announced production will run January 17-February 18, 2024. Public Obscenities follows a queer PhD student visiting family in Kolkata with his Black American boyfriend, and discovering "the pleasures and pitfalls of living in translation." Read about how Chowdhury took his experiences growing up in India and transformed them into a work that explores love, language, and finding understanding here.
Following its world premiere earlier this year, Macbeth (an undoing) will be mounted at the Brooklyn venue April 5-28, 2024 for its United States premiere. Written and directed by Zinnie Harris, Macbeth (an undoing) asks if we have really heard the whole story of Lady Macbeth. Nicole Cooper will reprise the role from the world premiere to portray this examination and re-imagination of the iconic character's trajectory. The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh Production is presented by TFANA in association with London's Rose Theatre. TFANA's production of The Merchant of Venice starring John Dougllas Thompson will also cross the Atlantic Ocean to play the Royal Lyceum in the winter of 2025.
The season will also feature the Off-Broadway premiere of Prometheus Firebringer, a hybrid performance-lecture written, directed, and performed by Annie Dorsen. Running September 15-October 1, the piece explores the ambiguous impacts of technology. Inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the humans, it uses predictive text model GPT-3 to generate speculations of the missing stories from Aeschylus' Prometheia trilogy. A different version plays out every night via AI-generated Greek masks.
TFANA also continues its free series of post-performance conversations about arts and activism, Bianca Vivion: Reflections.
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