Ensemble Studio Theatre will open its 58th season with the New York premiere of Beyond Words, Laura Maria Censabella's play about a Harvard researcher and the African grey parrot she taught to talk, and follow it in the spring with the world premiere of lucky/bird, a new play by recent Youngblood graduate Audley Puglisi.
Both productions play the company's Curt Dempster Theatre at 549 West 52nd Street, second floor, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Tickets for each go on sale on December 1, 2026.
Beyond Words runs February 8–March 7, 2027, with opening night on February 18. It is the latest production from the EST/Sloan Project, the long-running partnership between EST and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that commissions new plays about science and technology. Censabella, a two-time Sloan commissionee who runs EST's playwrights unit, draws on the real thirty-year collaboration between the scientist Irene Pepperberg and Alex, the parrot she taught to communicate and solve problems at roughly the level of a five-year-old, over the objections of her male colleagues. What starts as an experiment becomes, in Censabella's telling, a love story.
The play arrives with a track record: it premiered at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Boston Globe named it a Critic's Pick. Censabella's earlier Sloan commission, Paradise, won the IRNE Award for Best New Play and went on to a West Coast premiere at the Odyssey Theatre, produced by Viola Davis and Julius Tennon.
Fellow EST ensemble member Colette Robert directs. She staged Behind the Sheet for the company and, elsewhere Off-Broadway, the world premieres of Stargazers and Stew at Page 73, and was associate director of the first North American national tour of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
lucky/bird follows from May 17 to June 13, 2027, opening May 27. Puglisi's play is set among the Lucky, a close-knit Black community with a clouded past that marks its shared history with a parade every summer. On the night before the procession, Louise — three times widowed, shunned by her neighbors, and keeper of the peacocks on her front porch — receives a visitor, and it is never quite clear whether the stranger is a spirit or something she has imagined.
Puglisi, a playwright and poet, has developed work with Playwrights Horizons, Page 73 and The Playwrights Realm as well as at EST. The production is directed by Obie Award winner abigail jean-baptiste, whose credits include Chiaroscuro with National Black Theatre at The Flea and Furlough's Paradise at Yale Rep.
Co-Artistic Directors Estefanía Fadul and Graeme Gillis framed the pairing as a statement of what the company is for: “The heart of EST is the mix of generations and cultures written into its core: the nurturing of new voices and the commitment to artists over their creative lifetimes.”
The development slate runs alongside the mainstage all season. Youngblood's Asking for Trouble, a benefit festival of 10-minute plays involving more than 125 artists, plays October 17 and 18. The Youngblood Sunday Brunch returns on November 8, December 6, January 24, March 7, April 4 and June 6, each date pairing five new short plays on a monthly theme with a buffet; lineups and tickets are announced ahead of each. The EST/Sloan First Light Festival continues with a public reading of work by Marcus Yi on December 10, and the spring readings and new commissions will be named later in the season.
