Second Stage, a non-profit theater that focuses on the work of living American authors, has announced that it will bring to Broadway a series of well-known productions by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and new works by Paula Vogel this season.
This fall, the company will present Jacobs-Jenkins’ play “Appropriate,” about a family gathering in Arkansas interrupted by the discovery of a photo album full of disturbing imagery.
The play premiered in 2014 at the Off-Broadway non-profit Signature Theater Company. Ben Brantley, The Times’ chief theater critic at the time, praised the production as “amazing and sinister”.
The new production, which opens at the Helen Hayes Theater in November and opens in December, will be directed by Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery).Jacobs Jenkins 2016 Winner A recipient of the so-called “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, he has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for Gloria and Everyone, and is currently running The New York Times at Manhattan’s Signature Theater. He is also the author of Come Ups. . “Appropriate” was the first play he wrote for Broadway, but he provided material for the recent Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.”
Next spring, the second stage will host a new, untitled play by Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of How I Learned to Drive. The play, which hits theaters in March and is set to open in Hayes in April, will be directed by Tina Landau and is a family drama set in the Washington suburbs of 1962. Vogel is also the author of 2016’s Indecent. Broadway in 2017.
Second Stage also announced an Off-Broadway production of Jen Silverman’s new play Spain this fall. The film is set in 1936 and follows two KGB-supported filmmakers to make a film about the Spanish Civil War. The film will be directed by Tyne Raffaelli and will run at the Tony Kaiser Theater from November.
