Long Wharf's New Artistic Turn Under Jacob G. Padron; New Season Announced
A revival of the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam” will be a highlight of the 2020-21 Long Wharf Theatre season, and the first full slate chosen by artistic director Jacob G. Padron.
It will also be the only show on the main stage, given a financial crisis for the New Haven theater that will need to raise $5.5 million in two years. (More on that in a separate upcoming story.)
The other four shows of the 56th season will be presented in a remodeled 200-seat Stage II, which will feature new and more comfortable seating, among other audience amenities.
The season will feature one world premiere, one fresh take on a classic and many community and national partnerships. It is also a season with all the works being directed by women.
Padron describes the season as “a kaleidoscope, a slate that has something for everyone, reflecting our commitment to do classic plays in new and exciting ways, to do new American plays; and to tell stories that bring our entire community together. It’s a season that is meaningful; that is artistically innovative and one that is joyful.”
The first show will be a world premiere “Torera” by Monet Hurst Mendoza, which will play Oct. 9 to Nov. 3, in conjunction with The Sol Project, the national advisory group which helps place Latinx works and artists in theaters across the country. (Padron remains executive director of The Sol Project, a position he held before taking over the theater last year.) The director is Tatiana Pandiani.
Teaser for “Torera:” Bullfighting is a world nearly exclusive to men—yet for Elena Ramírez, it is her life's dream. With the help of her best friend, a matador's son, Elena begins secretly training to compete with the best. But when she discovers she is a descendant of a bullfighting great, the would-be toreador must choose between accepting society's limits or breaking boundaries.
The second show will be “A Night’s Dream,” a radically re-imagined version of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” featuring eight actors. It will be staged by Shana Cooper, a Yale School of Drama grad .
Next up will be the dramatic comedy play by Kristoffer Diaz’s “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” in association with New Haven’s Collective Consciousness Theatre, a smaller local company dedicated to artists of color. “I‘m really excited to amplify and support the work that CCT is doing,” says Padron. “They will be artistic partners every step of the way. We will pick the director, design team, and cast it — as well as market it —together.”
Teaser for the show: Professional wrestling’s farcical storylines seldom reflect the real-world absurdity occurring outside of the ring. In the play—a lampooning ode to unearthly athletes, powerbombs, flamboyant singlets, and America’s many dismaying isms—politically-charged comedy and adrenaline-filled scenes offer a looking glass for the hapless scripts that often predetermine society’s winners and losers.
This will be followed by Madhuri Shekar’s “Queen,” directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, who graduated from the directing program at Yale School of Drama last May. The play was previously produced by Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre. “We’re doing it in partnership with the National Asian American Theatre Company, which has launched a new initiative — The NAATCO National Partnership Project, — modeled by The Sol Project. “NAATCO seeks to partner with theaters all around the country to amplify Asian-American artists in the American theater eco-system,” says Padron. “Queen” launches that national initiative and the Long Wharf Theatre run will be followed by an off-Broadway engagement NAATCO will produce next spring.
Teaser for “Queen:” Not unlike academia, where postdoc depression—resultant of working long hours for low pay and limited recognition—is an inescapable matter of course, queen bees outwardly star in their roles as egg-laying and pheromone-producing royalty, when, in truth, they are underappreciated marionettes laden by the watchful scrutiny of thankless worker bees. These two realities collide as the play remarkably interweaves ambition, friendship, ethics, STEM, ecological crises, and agriculture’s most reviled bogeyman, Monsanto, into a provocative portrayal of brilliant women confronting inconvenient truths.
The season will end with “Jelly’s Last Jam,” directed by Patricia McGregor, who was a mentor of George Wolfe who wrote and staged the 1992 musical based on the life and times of Jelly Roll Morton.McGregor staged a different take on the show when she was a directing student at the Yale School of Drama. Padron says the work was also selected because of New Haven’s rich history of jazz. “We’re making it a community celebration and partnering with the Dixwell neighborhood" “where a lot of that jazz history lived.,” says Pardon .
Teaser for the musical: “Jelly Roll” Morton was a trailblazing pianist whose eccentric crisscrossing of ragtime, blues, and other uniquely African-American influences propelled his career as jazz’s first multidimensional composer. Jelly Roll’s thrilling genius afforded him a prosperous run in minstrel and vaudeville shows, pioneering and advancing jazz as popular music. The musical is a supernatural court-martialing that explores the internalized racism and conceit that powered the dazzling braggart to dizzying heights and inconceivable lows—all in swinging tribute to the jazz giant.
Padron is also planning in mid-September what he calls “an artistic congress, a gathering of artistic leaders in the Constitution state in an election year to talk about how to use our work as artists for meaningful change in rebuilding our democracy.” The gathering which will be a private convening, though there may be some parts of it open to the public. Details are not finalized yet, he says.
The season will also introduce The Remix: A Lab for Artistic Collisions, a space for local artists, new work development and civic engagement; a one-night-only 20th anniversary reading of The Good Person of New Haven; and the introduction of the Long Wharf Artistic Ensemble, a collective of eight artists who will develop new projects with and for Long Wharf in addition to being ambassadors in their respective communities and the community at large. The artists include Ryan Haddad, Mason Alexander Park, Bryce Pinkham, Madeline Sayet, Dexter J. Singleton and Awoye Timpo.