59E59 Theaters has filled out its winter 2027 calendar, and the new titles lean hard on the solo form: a Frank Lloyd Wright murder retold by the wife who vanished, Virginia Woolf speaking in her own sentences, and a Tennessee Williams clerk with poems in his desk drawer. Five productions are new to the season, which runs from January 9 to April 25 across the three stages on East 59th Street.
They arrive alongside two titles announced earlier. Red Bull Theater opens its run of God's Spies: The Making of King Lear on January 19, a Bill Cain play that shuts Shakespeare indoors during the plague of 1603, with a young Puritan lawyer and a seasoned sex worker for company, and asks what he could possibly write next. Nathan Winkelstein directs, and it plays through February 14. Before that, Primary Stages launches its new Studio Series with Aasif Mandvi: A Work in Progress (January 9–February 6), the actor and Daily Show veteran's solo account of an immigrant childhood and a career spent putting the right people at ease. Kimberly Senior directs, and the series is pitched as a space where a piece is still changing from night to night.
Daphne Rubin-Vega stars in Gertrude, or Asparagus Soup in August, which she wrote with director Aaron Mark, as the latest entry in LAByrinth Theater Company's LAB: STRIPPED series (February 3–14). The format is deliberately bare, with scripts in hand and little in the way of design. The subject is not: Gertrude Carlton, whose husband killed seven people at Wright's Wisconsin home and studio in 1914, and who disappeared after being released from custody with $7 and a train ticket to Chicago.
From February 11 to March 14, Lucy Stevens returns to the building in An Audience with Virginia Woolf: Writing One's Mind, a solo piece she assembled from Woolf's own writing, from The Waves and Orlando to A Room of One's Own, and set in 1931. Margarett Perry directs for Twilight Theatre Company. Stevens was last at 59E59 with her sold-out Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening.
Primary Stages follows with Beth Hyland's comedy Baby Shower Katie (February 27–April 11), directed by Jaki Bradley: two best friends, one desperate for a child and one appalled by the idea, working through four baby showers held for three different women called Katie. It is a co-world premiere with Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, and came out of the company's Liff Lab development program.
Gina Femia's Stories to Tell at the End of the World (March 4–20) puts three young women from one family in the same stretch of woods across several centuries, each facing the end of the world she knows. Kleo Mitrokostas performs it, under co-directors Tabatha Gayle and Kaitlin Paige Longoria, for New Light Theater Project and 5th Wall Theatre in association with Pendragon Theatre.
Twilight Theatre Company and Perry reunite for Brian Dykstra's The Two of You (March 18–April 25), in which a childless Boston couple's well-ordered life is upended by a 21-year-old who says she is the husband's daughter. Last in is MB Adaptors' Flight (March 25–April 24), Kari Margolis's adaptation of the Tennessee Williams story Episodes in the Life of a Clerk. Jarod Hanson plays Edward Schiller, a Depression-era stockroom clerk in St. Louis whose secret poetry is turned against him, in an hour-long solo with original music and multimedia.
Each production begins with First Look performances at $27. For Gertrude, the Woolf piece, Stories to Tell at the End of the World, The Two of You and Flight, tickets go on sale to 59E59 members on Tuesday, October 20, and to the general public on Tuesday, October 27. Full schedules are on the 59E59 Theaters website.
Still to come this fall at the same address are Penguin Rep's The Steel Man and Primary Stages' Fantasma.
