Long Wharf Theatre Announces Productions for Spring Season
Audience demand following expanded run of The Year of Magical Thinking sparks early announcement for Spring performances taking place across New Haven
New Haven, CT – Long Wharf Theatre (Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón and Managing Director Kit Ingui) today announced the details of its spring season: Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and Adil Mansoor’s Amm(i)gone. These innovative productions will fully activate the theatre’s new production model across New Haven and reinforce Long Wharf Theatre as an unparalleled hub for creative excellence.
Long Wharf Theatre began its historic journey in 1965 with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In 2024, the theatre returns to the dramatist who started it all, with a bold new production of Miller’s A View from the Bridge directed by James Dean Palmer and produced in association with Douglas Denoff. In 1950s Brooklyn, longshoreman Eddie Carbone harbors a subconscious and jealous affection for his niece, Catherine, whom he is raising with his wife. When distant cousins arrive unexpectedly from Italy and one of them falls for Catherine, Eddie takes drastic measures to protect his fragile American Dream. Deeply relevant, A View From The Bridge wrestles with truths about family, the complexities of how we assimilate and, ultimately, how we view ourselves as Americans.
Amm(i)gone, a production by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Kelly Strayhorn Theater, will make its first national tour stop in New Haven as the final play in Long Wharf Theatre’s spring season. In this moving production, creator and performer Adil Mansoor brings us on his deeply personal journey to translate and adapt the play Antigone with his Ammi (mother). Despite the deep love between them, their relationship is strained – Ammi struggles to accept Adil’s queerness and turns towards her faith in an attempt to save her son in the afterlife. Adil turns to an ancient Greek theatrical text to break the silence between them. Amm(i)gone asks: How do you choose between love and faith? What is lost (or gained) in translation and what transcends language itself? Through Greek tragedy, teachings from the Quran and audio conversations in Urdu and English, Mansoor and co-director Lyam B. Gabel create a theatrical blend of lecture and personal story about locating love across faith.
Performance venues, which will include iconic New Haven gathering spaces, and star casting will be announced in November.
Following audience demand, Long Wharf Theatre recently announced additional performances of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, featuring award-winning actress Kathleen Chalfant and conceived and directed by Jonathan Silverstein. These added performances will take place at New Haven Free Public Library Stetson Branch, Milford Public Library and Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library. Thanks to the generous support of a small group of sponsors, all three performances in the library series are free and open to the public. While tickets for all performances are currently sold out, interested audience members are urged to contact Long Wharf Theatre’s box office at 203-693-1486 to be placed on a waitlist for performances. The production – in partnership with the New York City-based Keen Company – takes the adaptation of Didion’s deeply personal memoir into living rooms and public gathering spaces to create an intimate, one-of-a-kind experience for theatre-goers.
“There is so much buzz and excitement around the work that we’re doing and we can’t wait to invite audiences to join us for a groundbreaking mix of timeless, contemporary and meaningful productions this coming spring,” said Jacob G. Padrón, Artistic Director of Long Wharf Theatre.“The response to The Year of Magical Thinking has been overwhelming and it’s shown us that our community has faith in all of the possibilities this new model brings.”
Long Wharf is consistently recognized for its pioneering efforts to redefine regional theatre, with Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón recently honored as a 2023 Top Creative by Town & Country.
“This is a unique time in Long Wharf Theatre’s history and the demand to see our productions tells us that we’re creating something big and bold,” said Kit Ingui, Managing Director of Long Wharf Theatre. “This new model affords us the opportunity to welcome theatre lovers into reimagined, local spaces and connect and experience our productions in new, exciting ways unlike ever before. We look forward to building on this vision even further in the spring and we’re grateful to our local partners and community members for joining us in this journey.”
“Arthur Miller is a titan of the American theatre who piercingly interrogates the parts of our souls we would prefer to keep hidden. Long Wharf Theatre understands the urgency of this play and I would only want to direct it with producers who care as deeply as they do about their community,” said James Dean Palmer, director of A View From The Bridge. “I find it really fitting that this masterpiece is being reborn at a great American theatre in the midst of its own beautiful revival.”
“I am honored to be collaborating with Jacob, Kit and their incredible team at Long Wharf Theatre to bring James Palmer’s new vision for Arthur Miller’s iconic play to New Haven at an exciting venue with an incredible cast,” said producer Douglas Denoff. “We all hope this production will continue beyond New Haven and bring Miller’s masterwork to a new audience.”
“Jacob, Kit and the Long Wharf Theatre team are brilliantly upending traditional models for regional theatre,” said Maria Manuela Goyanes, Artistic Director of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. “Amm(i)gone is a total full circle moment for the collaboration between both of our theatres, not only to give this gifted artist his own platform but to also launch a tour that will take his deep and meaningful story to the rest of our country and hopefully the world.”
Information on purchasing tickets will be announced in mid-November. Due to the limited capacity of the performance venues, interested ticket buyers are encouraged to contact Long Wharf Theatre’s box office or sign-up on either of the show pages at www.longwharf.org now to be placed on a “first notification” list. This list of interested theatergoers will receive the first opportunity to purchase tickets for the spring production, following our member presale.
About Our Partners
Keen Company
Keen Company is a Drama Desk and Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway company creating theater that connects. In intimate productions of plays and musicals, we celebrate the complexities of hope and the joys of the human condition. In recent seasons, Keen has brought to the New York City stage: Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage (first NY Revival), The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (first NY Revival), This Space Between Us by Peter Gil-Sheridan (World Premiere), Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage (NY Premiere), Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel, Surely Goodness and Mercy by Chisa Hutchinson (NY Premiere), Ordinary Days by Adam Gwon (first NY Revival, Drama League Nomination), Tick, Tick…BOOM! by Jonathan Larson (first NY Revival, Drama Desk Nomination), and a reimagined version of Marry Me a Little by Stephen Sondheim (Drama League Nomination). Keen also fosters mid-career playwrights through our Keen Playwrights Lab and mentors students from all five boroughs of NYC through our Keen Teens education program. In everything we do, Keen Company thrives through our welcoming ethos and community commitments. You’re invited to learn more at www.keencompany.org or connect @keencompany.
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
The Tony Award®-winning Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company creates badass theatre that highlights the stunning, challenging, and tremendous complexity of our world. For over 40 years, Woolly has maintained a high standard of artistic rigor while simultaneously daring to take risks, innovate, and push beyond perceived boundaries. One of the few remaining theatres in the country to maintain a company of artists, Woolly serves an essential research and development role within the American theatre. Plays premiered here have gone on to productions at hundreds of theatres all over the world and have had lasting impacts on the field. Currently co-led by Artistic Director Maria Manuela Goyanes and Managing Director Kimberly E. Douglas, Woolly is located in Washington, DC, equidistant from the Capitol and the White House. This unique location influences Woolly’s investment in actively working towards an equitable, participatory, and creative democracy.
Woolly Mammoth stands upon occupied, unceded territory: the ancestral homeland of the Nacotchtank whose descendants belong to the Piscataway peoples. Furthermore, the foundation of this city, and most of the original buildings in Washington, DC, were funded by the sale of enslaved people of African descent and built by their hands.
About Kelly Strayhorn Theater
Named after 20th century entertainment legends Gene Kelly and Billy Strayhorn, both natives of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kelly Strayhorn Theater (KST) is a home for creative experimentation, community dialogue, and collective action rooted in the liberation of Black and queer people. We welcome our home to all who uplift Black, Indigenous, people of color, and queer voices.
KST is an institutional arts anchor in Pittsburgh’s East End that has served the community for decades. Since launching KST Presents programming in ’08, KST has been Black-led, fostering radical imagination for Black and queer arts, culture, and community in Pittsburgh by cultivating BIPOC and/or queer artists, entrepreneurs, and arts administrators, developing their careers, and shifting narratives around Black possibility.
About Douglas Denoff
Douglas Denoff is an eight-time Tony-nominated theatre producer.
Recent Broadway productions as co-producer include Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign In Sidney Brustein’s Window, Take Me Out, Slave Play, Sea Wall/A Life. Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song (2018 revival), American Son, John Leguizamo’s Latin History For Morons, Fiddler On The Roof (2015 revival), Pretty Woman (Broadway/Tour/UK and Nice Work If You Can Get It, and 39 Steps both as coproducer on the original 3-year Broadway run and lead producer for its 2015 revival in New York. He hopes to bring 39 Steps back to New York in 2024 because “it’s time to start laughing again.” He was lead producer of The Lucky Star by Karen Hartman, directed by Noah Himmelstein at 59E59 Theatres and which is anticipated to transfer to Broadway in 2024-25
Denoff is developing several new plays including Interview by Teunkie van der Sluijs, The History of Love by Emily Maltby, and Lulu, a immersive new adaptation by Andi Villa Stover based on the plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box by Frank Wedekiind (Spring Awakening).
Upcoming musicals as lead producer include That’s Broadway, The Moves, The Music, The Magic, a celebration of Broadway’s greatest song and dance numbers, and the hilarious revival of The Pirates of Penzance; directed by John Rando and choreographed by Joshua Bergasse; the first Broadway revival of the beloved musical since 1982. suttonsquareentertainment.com
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