FROM THE FOUNDING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
This 25th Anniversary Season is meant to be one that celebrates our
history, our playwrights, our audiences, and the path we’ve taken
to get here while seeding all that is yet to be in the years to come.
Artistic Director Mark Lamos. In November, Naomi Wallace will
also return with a new play, the poetic and provocative Night is a
Room, directed by Bill Rauch. It has been a true privilege to
have both Pete and Naomi as Residency One playwrights here
at Signature, and to celebrate their bodies of work in dialogue
with each other. I am so thankful that these two playwrights
have joined the Signature family, and am already looking forward
to their future with Signature in our Legacy program.
Dear Signature Community:
“Curtain Up!” was a restaurant about a block away from here
and has long ago closed to make room for the changing face of
Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood that continues to reinvent itself.
Things and places come and go but moments stay with us, and
that particular restaurant, aptly named, was where Signature
Theatre was born some 25 years ago.
I had been to see a new play by Romulus Linney over at Theatre
Row and was with a small group of folks sitting at a round top at
Curtain Up!, talking about what we had seen and just generally
doing what young actors, directors, writers, and theatre people
do—bemoaning the state of the American theatre and trying to
top each other on how we might crack the puzzle and make it just
a bit better! As young artists we were just passionate and naïve
enough to dream about the possible, we hadn’t put our cynical
hats on yet and, to be honest, that hat has never fit me very well
anyway. It was there that I shared with my small group of friends
(and fans of Romulus) that I had been thinking about what it
might be like to do an entire season of Romulus Linney’s work,
invite him into every aspect of making that work, and to open
up his canon so that everyone could see the extraordinary
writer he was—impassioned, prolific, and of enormous range.
It might just give him a safe haven to let his work breathe and
allow him to find his youthful enthusiasm and optimism again,
which had many years earlier faded to a quiet resolve against
the broken machine that was chewing up our American writers
in the hit-or-miss ethic that was and continues to be prevalent.
That conversation led to a sequence of events that shortly thereafter gave birth to the first season of Signature Theatre: The Romulus
Linney Season. So many remarkable moments since, I find myself
writing to you in the house that Linney built; the Pershing Square
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Signature Center. Signature has always sought to make a home for
our playwrights—a group that has now grown to include twentynine writers among our three residency programs. And while the
concept of “home” has expanded with the opening of the Center,
it is truly embodied in the way we create work here at Signature:
every playwright has a place at the center of the artistic process.
It is that celebration of playwrights that allows us to immerse
Signature audiences in a writer’s body of work, and to foster
artistic relationships that will last for another twenty-five years.
This 25th season is special in many ways, but as always it’s one
that celebrates the astonishing range and depth of our playwrights. As Signature welcomes new writers into the Center
and greets familiar ones as they return, we are thrilled to do so
alongside the audiences that make up our vital, supportive, and
generous community.
Our Residency Five program continues to thrive, and the 2015-16
Season will welcome two world premiere productions from firsttime Signature playwrights. Our year starts with Annie Baker’s
newest play, John, which will be directed by Annie’s longtime
collaborator (and former Signature intern!) Sam Gold. And next
spring, Quiara Alegría Hudes will begin her Signature residency
with Daphne’s Dive, a heartfelt ode to a North Philly bar’s colorful inhabitants, directed by Tommy Kail. It has been wonderful to
watch Annie and Quiara’s work evolve over the last several years,
and I’m so thrilled to introduce Signature audiences to these two
tremendously powerful voices.
This Season will also conclude the residencies of two playwrights
who have gifted Signature’s stages with their distinctive voices
this past year. Performances will begin this August for the world
premiere of A.R. (Pete) Gurney’s Love & Money, a co-production
with the We