Soho Rep has announced its 2023-24 season, which will feature the Off-Broadway playwriting debut of Raja Feather Kelly (A Strange Loop). The season is the last programmed by the theatre's outgoing directors Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides.
Commissioned by Soho Rep, Kelly's The Fires will make its world premiere at the Off-Broadway venue May 8-June 16, 2024. Kelly will also direct his work which "tells the story of three men trying to understand love: what it means, where to find it, and how to experience it." The story unfolds in a Brooklyn railroad apartment with snapshots of their lives in 1971, 1998, and 2021. Peponides said in a statement, “The Fires reaches back through decades of Black queer discourse to make something that is wholly of the moment. I cannot wait for audiences to experience Raja’s unique voice as a playwright.”
Also making its world premiere at Soho Rep next season will be Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It's That Time of the Month by Becca Blackwell. Developed with Jess Barbagallo and Greg Corbino, Barbagallo will direct Blackwell and Amanda Duarte who will star in the work. Presented in association with The Bushwick Starr, the play follows a 6-foot tall vagina named Snatch Adams who loses her job as a clown at Planned Parenthood in 2016. Facing unemployment, she finds a job hosting a talk show with comic Tainty McCracken. Using puppets, the queer work celebrates power, autonomy, awareness, and love. Performances are scheduled for October 25-December 3. “Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken will satisfy anyone who goes nuts for excessive fake blood, sequins on anything (or, everything), and exceptional gross-out humor. But it is also deeply subversive. It asks meaningful questions about the body; how we discuss (or don’t) our bodily functions, needs, and desires; and what it means to reject the shame we are taught to have around all of it," said Peponides.
Following its world premiere at Soho Rep last season, Shayok Misha Chowdhury's Public Obscenities will have runs at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company this November into December, followed by an engagement at Theatre for a New Audience beginning in January 2024. The world premiere was presented by Soho Rep and NAATCO. Read about how Chowdhury took his experiences growing up and transformed them into a work that explores love, language, and finding understanding here.
Soho Rep Director Cynthia Flowers said in a statement, “This season is the last one planned by my beloved partners, Meropi Peponides and Sarah Benson, and it exemplifies the beautiful ways in which their programming brought to life Soho Rep’s mission of providing meaningful opportunities for radical theatermakers at critical junctures in their artistic practices.
In the fall, the theatre will host its Writer Director Lab Presentations, including Nkenna Akunna and Nana Dakin's Woo Woo Child (September 15-16), Ran Xia and Risa Puno's Unresolved Rage Game (September 23), and Carolina Đỗ and Annie Jin Wang's Untitled Seagull Project (September 29-30). The Writer Director Lab is co-chaired by Jackie Sibblies Drury and William Burke. Admission to all presentations is free.
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