Vineyard Theatre has added a week to MS. BLAKK FOR PRESIDENT, the new play by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Tina Landau, which will now run through November 29, 2026. The extension arrives a week before the first preview.
It is a single extra week, and the Vineyard has scheduled six performances for it: 2PM and 7PM on Tuesday, November 24; 2PM on Wednesday, November 25; 2PM and 7PM on Saturday, November 28; and a closing 2PM matinee on Sunday, November 29.
Previews begin October 22, 2026, ahead of an opening night on November 8. Landau directs, and the production opens the company's 2026–27 season.
The play's subject is Joan Jett Blakk, the drag persona of the Chicago performer and activist Terence Alan Smith, who in the early 1990s became the first, and so far the only, Black drag queen to run for President of the United States. With the AIDS epidemic at its height, Joan and the newly founded Queer Nation Chicago set out to carry queer politics onto the floor of the Democratic National Convention. The writers take Smith's real campaign as a starting point rather than a script, and pitch the evening somewhere between a political rally, a club act and a confession.
Tony nominee Ato Blankson-Wood plays Terence Alan Smith and Joan Jett Blakk. Blankson-Wood already has a home at the Vineyard as its 2025–2027 Colman Domingo Award recipient, as we noted when the company named its latest Paula Vogel Playwriting Award winner. The rest of the company is Nic Ashe (Queen Sugar), Tony nominee Gideon Glick (To Kill a Mockingbird), Kelvin Moon Loh (Beetlejuice), Sawyer Smith (The Devil Wears Prada) and Adina Verson (Indecent, Liberation). Polanco Jones Jr. (The Wiz) understudies Terence Alan Smith / Joan Jett Blakk.
McCraney, an Academy Award winner for Moonlight whose plays include Choir Boy, is no stranger to the Vineyard: the company named the playwright its Paula Vogel Playwriting Award winner in 2008. Landau, a Tony nominee for Floyd Collins, shares the writing credit as well as directing.
Tickets are on sale from the Vineyard at vineyardtheatre.org. The theater is at 108 East 15th Street, near Union Square. Its season continues in February 2027 with PETRA, Half Straddle's piece drawn from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and directed by Tina Satter; a third production is still to be announced.
