‘Downstate’ and ‘Catch as Catch Can’ in Playwrights Horizons New Season

“Downstate,” a Bruce Norris play that The New York Occasions’s chief theater critic, Jesse Inexperienced, has known as a “squirmy moral-thrill-ride,” will make its New York premiere in October as a part of Playwrights Horizons’s new season, the corporate introduced on Monday.

As Adam Greenfield, the inventive director for Playwrights Horizons, put it: “If theater is right here to catch us off guard, to shake our foundations, to make us rethink our values and notice the methods during which we’re hypocrites,” Norris can actually level that every one out.

“I generally assume he’s just like the Molière of our time,” Greenfield mentioned in a latest Zoom interview.

The 2022-23 season can be Greenfield’s first full, in-person season since assuming the position of inventive director in 2020. And the five-show lineup, which options coproductions with Web page 73 Productions, MCC Theater and WP Theater, is full of themes rising from the pandemic lockdown, together with a wide range of views on “normalcy.”

The lineup contains Mia Chung’s “Catch as Catch Can,” a drama during which two white, working-class New England households study what Greenfield known as “the slipperiness of identification and the best way identification can collapse or collapse,” and the debut of Agnes Borinsky’s “The Timber,” a parable of two siblings who go to sleep within the park and get up actually rooted to the panorama.

“Catch as Catch Can,” which, in 2018, The Occasions known as a “tender horror story,” returns in October. This time, it’s being staged with an all Asian solid taking part in the Irish and Italian working class — with actors additionally taking part in double roles of father and daughter, moms and sons.

“The Timber,” which can premiere in February 2023, is particular to Greenfield. He knew this Borinsky play was the primary work he wished to program when he grew to become inventive director.

“She sees the world sweetly regardless of seeing the entire causes to not,” he mentioned.

The play, which, Greenfield described as involving two individuals who flip into bushes and the neighborhood that varieties round them, can be co-produced with the incubator theater firm Web page 73 Productions (the corporate’s newest work was the spooky political drama, “Man Cave”).

The earthy Off Broadway manufacturing may have loads of shine from Broadway visionaries. “The Timber” can be directed by Tina Satter, whose fall 2021 Broadway docudrama “Is This a Room” acquired vital acclaim. And the final time Playwrights Horizons and Web page 73 teamed up, it was to debut “A Unusual Loop,” which received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for drama and opens on April 26 for its personal Broadway run.

The opposite exhibits, slated to debut in March 2023, are the world premiere of Julia Izumi’s “Regretfully, So the Birds Are,” (a coproduction with WP Theater), described by Greenfield as a surprise-filled “Swiss Military knife of a play” with “a scrumptious sense of goofy comedy” centered on three siblings making sense of unreliable mother and father.

Additionally in March is John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Moist Mind” (co-produced with MCC Theater), a candid drama that follows siblings (additionally a set of three) struggling to search out language for closure and grief — in outer area. It’s a science fiction model of the American household play that, Greenfield mentioned, “explodes open.”