Second Stage announces 2023-2024 Season with Jacobs-Jenkins, Vogel, and Silverman

https://www.playbill.com/article/second-stage-will-give-branden-jacobs-jenkins-his-broadway-playwriting-debut-this-fall-with-a-new-production-of-appropriate

Second Stage Theater's upcoming 45th anniversary season will see a Broadway playwriting debut for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, along with world premieres from Jen Silverman and Paula Vogel.

Kicking off in November, the season will begin Off-Braodway with the world premiere of Guggenheim Fellow Silverman’s play Spain, directed by Tyne Rafaeli at the company's Tony Kiser Theater. Set in 1936, the work follows two filmmakers working on a sweeping epic about the Spanish CIvil War that happens to be bankrolled by the KGB.

Next up will be a new Broadway production of Obie winner and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Jacobs-Jenkins' Appropriate at the Hayes Theater, also starting in November. Centered on a white family who learns they have ancestral ties to the Klan, the work was previously produced in 2014 Off-Broadway at Signature Theatre. Lila Neugebauer is helming the Broadway bow. The production will mark Jacobs-Jenkins' full Broadway playwriting debut, following a credit in 2022 for contributing additional material to Lincoln Center Theater's revival of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.

Moving into 2024, the company will give a world premiere to a new play by Pultizer Prize-winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive), to be directed by Tina Landau (The SpongeBob Musical) at the Hayes. The currently untitled work follows Phyllis, a mother struggling with her pre-conceived dreams for her teenaged children and the paths that they would prefer to take in the changing world of 1962.

Updated On: 6/15/23 at 01:05 PM

I say this with great appreciation for the work they're doing, but between Riverside, Thanksgiving, and Appropriate- I wish they'd focus on strictly mounting new plays rather than plays that are new-ish - all having very recently made the regional circuit. I have no doubt Appropriate is going to be great, but it's repeat viewing for many regional theatregoers and I hope BJJ gets an opportunity for a world premiere at Second Stage soon.

As someone who didn’t discover Appropriate until just last year (shout-out to the good folks at the Drama Book Shop), I’m VERY excited for this production!

JoeW4 said: "I don't entirely disagree, but it's worth noting that bringing back existing plays by contemporary playwrights was the original mission of Second Stage (it's built into their name), and remains a key facet of their programming."

Yes, and it's unlikely that something like APPROPRIATE or RIVERSIDE would make it to Broadway otherwise.