Long Wharf Announces Its Return To The Stage In 2021-2022 Season

Mason Alexander Park in I Am My Own Wife. They will return to the stage this coming season in a solo cabaret directed by Paul McGill titled Catharsissy. T. Charles Erickson Photo.

A meditation on colony collapse disorder that doubles as an ethical quagmire for the woman at its center. A world premiere that grapples with gentrification in the present, then dips into the enchantment and depth of the ancestral past. A fashion show with 56 years of dramatic history, packed into a single film by a New Haven studio. 

All of those are on tap as Long Wharf Theatre plots a return to the stage in its upcoming 2021-2022 season, with dates that are still in flux. Wednesday, the theater announced a run of performances that pick up where it left off in March 2020 and pull from its pandemic-era adaptations. A focus on storytelling and collaboration, particularly with fellow regional theaters, sits at the core of its work.

"When we're doing our job really well, a group of strangers walk into a space as strangers, but they leave as a community because of the story that they took in together,” said Artistic Director Jacob Padrón in a Zoom call last week. “So, that's the thing that I'm really excited about—is being able to actually bring people back into the space."

The season has been over a year in the making. When Padrón and Long Wharf began planning, they made a decision to bring back Lloyd Suh's The Chinese Lady, which was in tech rehearsals when the pandemic hit New Haven last March. The 2019 work, which will be directed by Ralph Peña, introduces audiences to the story of Afong Moy. Moy, who hailed from Guangzhou Province, was ostensibly the first Chinese woman to arrive in the United States.   

Padrón said bringing the show back feels like picking up after “a long intermission.” When the theater shut down last March, he had just announced a full season and was days away from the opening of Suh's work. Even as he set out a ghost light and watched Long Wharf shrink to a skeleton crew, the theater kept parts of the set in a sort of hopeful gesture that it would be back.

Meanwhile, it pivoted to short plays on Zoom, virtual celebrations of new work and Black trans women, ongoing support for young artists, New Haven-based storytelling and a reinvented version of the New Haven Play Project on screen.

This fall, The Chinese Lady will open amidst a years-long spike in verbal and physical violence against members of the Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, as well as new momentum to amplify those voices on stage and in New Haven. The performance intersects with projects unfolding in the greater New Haven community including Brilliant Boba, a new storytelling initiative from the Yale-China Association that has gained support from members of AAPI New Haven.   

“I feel really committed to still sharing this story of The Chinese Lady, which is such a beautiful, beautiful play, with our community and our audience," Padrón said.

Jacob Padrón, the artistic director at Long Wharf Theatre, at a press conference around federal funding in January of this year. Lucy Gellman File Photo. 

The theater is also growing its commitment to creative and institutional partnerships, from New Haven's Lotta Studio to the Atlanta-based Alliance Theatre. As the second show in its season, it will roll out Anna Deavere Smith's 1993 Fires in the Mirror, a one-woman show based on Smith's extensive, first person interviews around the August 1991 Crown Heights riots.

That month, the first vehicle of a three-car motorcade carrying Chasidic Jews hit and killed 7-year-old Gavin Cato in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. Cato, the child of Guyanese immigrants, had been playing with his bike when he was crushed by the car. In the aftermath of that violence, Smith conducted over 100 interviews, from staff at New York’s Commission on Human Rights to neighborhood residents who make Crown Heights into the diverse, prismatic and sometimes deeply divided community that it is.   

The work may feel blisteringly relevant to not just Crown Heights but to New Haven, where tensions remain high between Black city residents and their Orthodox neighbors in the city’s Beaver Hills neighborhood. Padrón called director Nicole Brewer, who has become nationally known for her anti-racism work and advocacy, as “exactly the right person” to bring the show to life nearly three decades after it was written.

The season continues with a three-theater world premiere of Eliana Pipes Dream Hou$e, spread between Long Wharf, the Alliance Theatre, and a third regional partner that has yet to announce its season. The show will be directed by Laurie Woolery, who last collaborated with Padrón and The Sol Project on a lush, memory-soaked production of ​​El Huracán when it premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2018.

Padrón said he is excited not just to work again with Woolery, but to bring Pipes’ work to audiences after it was featured in Long Wharf’s virtual new works festival last December.

“We just continue to honor our commitment in terms of Long Wharf being a real incubator and a real artistic home for the development of new American plays,” he said. “And to really support emerging artists.” 

As the final large-scale work in its season, the theater will be returning to Madhuri Shekar's Queen, which it had planned to do during its 2020-2021 lineup. Directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, the work will unfold in partnership with the National Asian American Theatre Company (NATCO) as part of a national initiative to “make sure Asian-American voices are rigorously included across the theatrical landscape,” Padrón said. The work follows Sanam Shah, an Indian-American mathematician, as she finds an error in years of research on colony collapse disorder and must decide what to do with that knowledge.

Dr. Ayse Kubra Coskun in the 2020 New Haven Play Project. Screenshot from YouTube.

Behind the scenes—and sometimes in front of them too—Long Wharf is also working to strengthen its relationships with both community partners and the newly-christened David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University. This year, design students in Yale’s graduate program will be able to apprentice on some of Long Wharf’s productions, a move that Padrón said feels natural.

Currently, those students are otherwise unable to return to live performance until the Yale Rep’s season resumes in January 2022 with Susan Soon He Stanton’s Today Is My Birthday.

“We thought, this is a moment where we can really center abundance, and we can remove some of the silos that sometimes exist between our institutions,” Padrón said. “Why don’t we actually come together and support each other? We are stronger together. And anytime we are able to partner—I just think that is the future of American theater. What can you learn from your partners, and what can they learn from you?” 

In the same spirit, the theater plans to showcase two new films, incubate and share new, in-process works, continue the New Haven Play Project with a film and community performance, and drop new installments of its ongoing series The LAB @ LWT. In the coming months, it will premiere a fashion show that features costumes from 56 years of productions in the space. Like much of the theater’s season, its release date remains in flux.

Padrón said that Lotta Studio is currently filming with models who are “local stalwarts of the New Haven community.” He praised Artistic Producer ​​Hope Chávez and Director of Marketing and Communications King Kenny as the minds behind the show, which will double as a fundraiser for the theater’s new initiative “A Generation of Access.” The initiative’s mission is to support young people, particularly New Haven Public Schools students, who want to learn about theater but may not have the financial resources to tap into it.   

Other projects, such as a second installment of Long Wharf’s Artistic Congress, may develop as the year progresses. Padrón confirmed that actor Mason Alexander Park, who appeared in the theater’s performance of I Am My Own Wife in February 2020, will return to the stage with a solo cabaret titled Catharsissy. Since 2020, they have been a member of Long Wharf’s growing and emergent Artistic Ensemble.

The announcement comes almost a full year after Long Wharf first pivoted to a member-sustained model. Last September, Managing Director Kit Ingui said that the theater ended the 2020 fiscal year with an estimated $2 million in losses from the 2019-2020 season. After an initial round of layoffs in the spring of last year, it eliminated 40 full- and part-time positions, bringing a staff of 65 to 25. Those do not include hundreds of contract workers—actors, directors, dramaturgs, educators, artistic fellows and designers—who usually fill the theater each year.

As it brings people back into its space, the theater is still recovering financially. Last fall, it received $551,400 in Federal CARES Act funding distributed by the Connecticut Office of the Arts. It most recently received $207,181 from the Shuttered Venues Operators Grant program, or SVOG. 

Padrón said he is excited to strengthen partnerships with the New Haven Pride Center, New Haven Free Public Library, Shubert Theatre and International Festival of Arts & Ideas among others. This summer, Long Wharf is continuing that work with a second installment of Black Trans Women at the Center on Aug. 4, as well as its Play On My Block initiative with the City of New Haven at the end of August.

“We still have so much more work to do in that area,” Padrón said. “We are not done. There is so much more that we can be doing, and I’m excited to continue doing that work. And to continue being held accountable to that work.” 

"I have been really moved by the idea that we're making the path together," he later added. "In order for Long Wharf to really transform, it's not just about the artistic director. It's not just about the managing director. It's about all of us working in partnership. It's moving from the 'I' to the 'we.' It's ongoing work."

Tickets for Long Wharf’s members go on sale August 4. Tickets and more information are available on Long Wharf’s website.