Powerhouse Theater Announces Landmark Summer Season

The Oscar, Pulitzer, and Tony are among the many honors held by the artists participating in this summer’s Powerhouse Theater program, which will feature nearly 20 productions from June 20–July 27.

This marks the 30th season of the acclaimed Powerhouse collaboration between Vassar and New York Stage and Film, a not-for-profit organization that continues to focus on helping emerging and established artists develop new works for the stage and screen.

In Your Arms, a work performed by dancers and conceived by some of the theater world’s top writers, will be among Powerhouse’s Mainstage productions. Tony Award–winning choreographer Christopher Gattelli (Newsies, Sunday in the Park with George) will direct the series of dance vignettes based on scenarios written by a group of preeminent playwrights, including Marsha Norman, Terrence McNally, David Henry Hwang, and Christopher Durang. Translated to dance, each vignette tells a story about a pair of lovers without using words.

Returning Powerhouse luminaries include playwright-screenwriter John Patrick Shanley, whose Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play Doubt had its first staged reading at Powerhouse in 2004, as well as playwright Richard Greenberg, who won a Tony for Take Me Out. Shanley’s latest offering will be The Danish Widow, a Hitchcock-like mystery with a modern edge. In Greenberg’s new play The Babylon Line, suburbanites show a bohemian writer they live far more than cookie-cutter lives. That production will feature Frank Wood (who won a Tony for his role in Side Man, which he began at Powerhouse), actress Leslie Bibb (Talladega Nights, Reasons to Be Happy), and actor Josh Radnor from the hit TV show How I Met Your Mother.

This season, musicals will range from a retro love story to a supernatural journey. Director Michael Greif (If/Then, Next to Normal, Rent) will helm A Walk on the Moon, a musical adaptation of the hit 1999 film starring Diane Lane. It’s about a young housewife’s extramarital affair set in the Catskills in 1969 with Woodstock as a cultural reference. A Walk on the Moon will feature music and lyrics by Paul Scott Goodman (Bright Lights, Big City), with the film’s screenwriter Pamela Gray contributing the book and additional lyrics.

In SeaWife, a spectacular tale of ghosts and sea monsters that’s part play and part concert, the New York City–based band The Lobbyists will do double-duty performing the music they composed. The piece was cowritten with playwright Seth Moore and developed with director Liz Carlson, the artistic director of the renowned New York–based Naked Angels theater company.

As part of Powerhouse’s Inside Look offerings, Pulitzer winner Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart, The Jacksonian) will share with audiences her new slapstick comedy Laugh, the story of a suddenly wealthy orphan’s mishaps and moxie. Another Inside Look workshop will be The Light Years, cowritten by Vassar alumnae/i Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen (both ’00), well known as cofounders and artistic directors of The Debate Society theater company, based in New York City. This haunted love story begins during the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and resumes when the Fair returns 40 years later.

“We are thrilled to be bringing together new artists with people who are part of our extended family after 30 years,” says Johanna Pfaelzer, artistic director of New York Stage and Film. “John Patrick Shanley has been with us since the very beginning. Beth Henley and Richard Greenberg have created indelible memories for our audiences, and Josh Radnor even began his Powerhouse career as an acting apprentice.”

Radnor participated in the Powerhouse Theater Training Program in 1994, and he returned to Powerhouse in the 2008 Mainstage play Finks (by Joe Gilford) alongside Tony nominee Jennifer Westfeldt. Another former apprentice, playwright Ayad Akhtar, will also make his return to Powerhouse this season. On the heels of his play Disgraced winning the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Akhtar’s new work The Invisible Hand will be presented during this summer’s second Readings Festival. The Training Program continues to bring upwards of 40 aspiring playwrights, actors, and directors (college students and some rising high school seniors) to campus each summer to hone their skills for professional work.

All told, Powerhouse consists of an eight-week residency on the Vassar campus during which more than 250 professional artists and the Powerhouse apprentices live and work together in a dynamic, creative community.

—Julia Fishman

Visit powerhouse.vassar.edu for more season information, to purchase subscriptions and single tickets, and to sign up for the Powerhouse mailing list. Follow Powerhouse on Facebook and Twitter for casting announcements and other breaking news.