The Public Theater has added nine projects to its 2026-27 season, taking the total to 18, one of the largest in its history. The first of them to reach an audience is a new short play by Caryl Churchill, premiering in New York and London at the same time.
Triumph, a 15-minute piece, runs October 8–18 in the Shiva Theater as a free pop-up, staged on select dates ahead of mainstage performances. Admission costs nothing but must be reserved in advance. It is a joint world premiere, opening alongside a concurrent production at the Almeida Theatre in London. Churchill takes her cue from Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars: her central figure is Iris, press secretary to a line of Roman emperors, and the play has been timed to land ahead of November's midterm elections. Annaleigh Ashford plays Iris, with Joe Tapper as Marcus, and Saheem Ali, The Public's associate artistic director and resident director, directs.
The rest of the downtown additions lean just as hard on the present. In The Surge, documentary theater-makers Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen turn to Operation Metro Surge, which sent an estimated 3,000 ICE agents into Minnesota, building the play from interviews gathered across the Twin Cities after The Public and the Guthrie Theater jointly commissioned it in January. Blank directs, and it plays Martinson Hall in winter/spring 2027, produced in association with the Guthrie.
Nathan Englander's Olivier-nominated comedy What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, in which two Jewish couples, one secular and one ultra-Orthodox, end up in exactly the fight they had sworn off, gets its New York premiere in the Barbaralee Theater from April 8 to May 2, opening April 20. Patrick Marber directs.
Joe's Pub presents Meet Me at the End of the World, the rock musical about singer-songwriter Jesse Malin, which picked up a 2026 Drama Desk nomination under its earlier title, Silver Manhattan, after a run at Bowery Palace. Malin wrote it with Wilder L. Ludwig, and it follows him from CBGB at the age of 12 to Madison Square Garden, and through the 2023 spinal stroke that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Ellie Heyman directs for producers ArKtype and David Bason, in the Shiva Theater May 4–June 13, opening May 12.
The downtown season closes with Phil, a world premiere from Elevator Repair Service, the company behind Gatz. It adapts George Saunders's novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, about a populist strongman in the tiny nation of Outer Horner and its even tinier neighbor, Inner Horner. John Collins directs in Martinson Hall, May 25–June 27, opening June 10.
A new reading series, What's Past Is Prologue: Plays That Grapple with the Future, revisits plays that saw trouble coming. It begins with Calamity West's In the Canyon (2018), directed by Kylie Eustis Brown; Richard Nelson's Conversations in Tusculum (2008), which Nelson directs himself; and Susan Glaspell's Inheritors (1921), directed by Jessie Austrian. Dates for the readings have not been announced, and more titles will follow later in the season.
Next summer, Free Shakespeare in the Park returns to the Delacorte with Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 staged as one story, the first time the two parts have been played together there since 1968. Rachel Chavkin directs, and Wendell Pierce plays Falstaff. Belvoir St Theatre and Kurinji's Counting and Cracking follows. S. Shakthidharan's epic of a Sri Lankan-Australian family between 1956 and 2004, written with Eamon Flack, who co-directs, returns to New York after its run at NYU Skirball. Public Works marks its 15th anniversary with A Midsummer Night's Dream, adapted and directed by Ali with music and lyrics by Michael Thurber, and the Mobile Unit will tour a free Shakespeare production directed by Lori Elizabeth Parquet across all five boroughs.
"In my lifetime, our democracy has never felt more threatened, and in times like these the theater has a special obligation: it is the art form of democracy," said artistic director Oskar Eustis.
Tickets for What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, along with the previously announced Are the Bennet Girls OK? and Welcome Table, go on sale to Public Theater Partners and Supporters Plus on Tuesday, October 6, to Supporters on Thursday, October 8, and to single-ticket buyers on Wednesday, October 21. Every production this season will again offer free tickets to one performance through a digital lottery.
Already playing downtown this fall are Red Bull Theater's How Shakespeare Saved My Life and Ryan J. Haddad's Good Time Charlie, both through October 25, with the North American premiere of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button beginning October 8.
