La MaMa’s Season Includes an Indigenous Take on Shakespeare

In a season that is expected to include the reopening of its flagship theater after a three-year, $24 million renovation, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club will present an Indigenous take on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a theatrical examination of the Tulsa Race Massacre and a vaudeville concert that explores the history of cannabis.

“We’re in a revolutionary time right now,” Mia Yoo, the artistic director of the theater, on the Lower East Side, said in an interview, “and we need to think about who the voices are that we need to look to to guide us.”

The original home of La MaMa, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, is at 74A East Fourth Street. It is slated to reopen in January with two flexible, acoustically separated theaters; green rooms; a cafe; and an open-air roof terrace. All of the shows this season will take place at two of the company’s other spaces — the Ellen Stewart Theater and the Downstairs, both at 66 East Fourth Street. When 74A is reopened there will be an additional slate of productions announced.

The season will kick off with the La MaMa Puppet Series (Sept. 27-Oct. 24), a biannual festival of new contemporary puppet theater. It will be followed by in-person and online performances of “A Few Deep Breaths” (Oct. 27-30), a collaboration among seven writers, including Adrienne Kennedy, Chuck Mee and Robert Patrick, that premiered online at La MaMa in June and is a co-presentation with CultureHub, La MaMa’s digital arts division.

The world premiere of James E. Reynolds’s “History/Our Story: The Trail to Tulsa” will run Dec. 9 through Dec. 12. Dance, music and spoken word performances will examine the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of America’s deadliest outbreaks of racial violence. There will be a post-performance audience discussion following the show.

In January, La MaMa, HERE Arts Center and the Prototype Festival will present the world premiere of Talvin Wilks and Baba Israel’s “Cannabis: A Viper Vaudeville,” exploring the history of the plant through music, dance and spoken word. Also in January, the choreographer and director Martha Clarke’s “God’s Fool,” an interpretation of the story of St. Francis of Assisi, will have its world premiere.

The world premiere of “Misdemeanor Dream,” a Native American adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will open in March. The production, which has a cast of 20 Indigenous actors, will be performed by Spiderwoman Theater, an all-women Native American company, and directed by Muriel Miguel, the company’s founder and artistic director.

Later in the spring, Qendra Multimedia, a Kosovo-based cultural organization that focuses on contemporary theater and literature, and La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company will present the U.S. premiere of “Balkan Bordello,” a play aiming to expose the fragility of democracy within the framework of Aeschylus’ tragedy Oresteia. And concluding the season, in May, will be the New York premiere of Elizabeth Swados’s reimagined musical composition “The Beautiful Lady,” which adapts the words of Russian poets who lived and performed in St. Petersburg during the 1917 Russian Revolution. It will be directed by Anne Bogart, one of the founders of SITI Company, which will take its final bow in 2022.

Audience members must show proof of vaccination to attend performances, and masks are required at all times. Children under the age of 12 are welcome, but must be masked. For more information, visit lamama.org.