Adjmi, David

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    How ‘Stereophonic’ Made Musicians Out of Actors

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    The new Broadway play conjures a group as dazzling as peak Fleetwood Mac. This is how five actors with limited training (one never held a bass) became rock stars.About a week into rehearsals for the Off Broadway premiere of David Adjmi’s latest play, “Stereophonic,” Will Butler sent an email to the cast. Butler, a former member of Arcade Fire, had a new band, Will Butler + Sister Squares, and a new self-titled album. A club in Brooklyn would soon host the record release party. Butler, the composer of “Stereophonic,” had a proposition: The actors should open for him.Sarah Pidgeon, a cast member, remembered reading the message last August during a rehearsal break. “I immediately said no,” she recalled. “Because what if it’s a failure?”She had taken piano lessons as a child, but Pidgeon didn’t consider herself a musician. Neither did any of the other actors. “Stereophonic,” which opened last week at Broadway’s Golden Theater, is set in recording studios in the mid-1970s, and conjures an unnamed band as dynamic, dazzling and sexy as peak Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin. It would be daunting enough to impersonate a band of that caliber onstage after a full rehearsal period. But to play a real show in a real club after just a few weeks. This was an invitation to public humiliation.Juliana Canfield (“Succession”), another cast member, was also a no. “I was like, Geez, we can’t get through one tune without falling apart,” she said. “This could be really, really embarrassing.”But the men in the fictional band insisted. (“We suffered from peer pressure,” Pidgeon joked.) Which explains how on Sept. 23, the five actors — Will Brill on bass, Canfield on keyboards, Tom Pecinka on guitar, Pidgeon on tambourine, Chris Stack on drums — stood onstage at the Williamsburg club Elsewhere, in front of hundreds of ticket holders who didn’t know the group was only pretending to be a band. There were no scripted lines for them that night, no characters to hide behind.Brill described it as “a really extreme piece of exposure therapy” and “just horror.” But the therapy worked. At Elsewhere, for the first time, the actors — panicked, exhilarated — felt like a band.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Stereophonic’ Review: Hitmakers Rendered in Sublime Detail

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      In David Adjmi’s new play, with songs by Will Butler, a ’70s band’s success breeds tension, and punches up the volume on Broadway.Peering behind the mystique of rock ’n’ roll has undeniable voyeuristic appeal. So there is an immediate thrill to seeing the mahogany-paneled control room and glassed-in sound booth that fill the Golden Theater stage, where “Stereophonic” opened on Friday. But David Adjmi’s astonishing new play, with songs by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, delivers far more than a dishy glimpse inside the recording studio during rock’s golden age.A fly-on-the-wall study of how people both need and viciously destroy each other, “Stereophonic” is a fiery family drama, as electrifying as any since “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Its real-time dissection of making music — a collaboration between flawed, gifted artists wrangled into unison — is ingeniously entertaining and an incisive meta commentary on the nature of art. The play is a staggering achievement, and already feels like a must-see American classic.It’s 1976 in Sausalito, Calif., and a not-yet-famous band — at least not solely inspired by Fleetwood Mac — is laying down the record that will propel it to stardom and unravel the personal lives of its members (in much the same way that making “Rumours” did for Fleetwood Mac). The setting (a marvel by scenic designer David Zinn) is a pressure-cooker: The coffee machine is broken but there’s a gallon bag of cocaine, and tensions and affections — both creative and personal — are running hot.Stillness and silence are as expressive as Adjmi’s meticulously orchestrated dialogue, body language sometimes even more so, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDirected with a conductor’s precision by Daniel Aukin, “Stereophonic” is an epic canvas rendered in hyper-intimate detail: whispered confidences and technical adjustments, slouches and stares, lots of lying around and rolling joints. Stillness and silence are as expressive as Adjmi’s meticulously orchestrated dialogue, body language sometimes even more so. It’s possible to read the band’s ascension to fame beyond the confines of the studio, as its previous album creeps up the Billboard charts, in the swiveling hips of its lead singer alone (and in the progression of prints and flares in Enver Chakartash’s divine costumes).When the poetic and insecure Diana, played with stunning vulnerability by Sarah Pidgeon, sits down at the piano some 45 minutes into the three-hour show, the actor’s radiant voice delivers the first significant composition the audience hears: “Bright,” a folk-tinged rock ballad with sterling, ethereal vocals. Until then, notes trickle out in brief bursts. Often interrupted or doled out in riffs, the expressions of character and discord generated by Butler’s music are abstract — their fragmentation designed to make you want more. (Savor the early sessions when everyone can stand to be in the same room.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Stereophonic,’ a New Play About Making Music, to Open on Broadway

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      Written by David Adjmi and featuring songs by Will Butler, the drama follows five musicians making an album in the 1970s.“Stereophonic,” an acclaimed behind-the-music play about a disputatious band recording a studio album, will transfer to Broadway this spring following a buzzy and sold-out Off Broadway run.The play, written by David Adjmi, is set mostly inside a Sausalito, Calif., recording studio, and follows five musicians and two sound engineers through a year in the 1970s. The story — featuring romance, infighting, drug use and a solo-star-in-the-making — resembles that of Fleetwood Mac, but Adjmi says he had many inspirations for the play.The 14-week Broadway production is expected to begin previews April 3 and to open April 19 at the Golden Theater.The Off Broadway run, over 10 weeks last fall at the nonprofit Playwrights Horizons, garnered strong reviews. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called it “relentlessly compelling.”The show also won significant praise for its original songs, which were written by Will Butler, a former member of Arcade Fire.Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, described the play as being about “a group of brilliant artists who are at odds with each other, trying to figure out how to collaborate without killing one another, even when killing one another might be the easier way out.” Also, he said, “it’s set in a world that is incredibly sexy — the West Coast rock scene of the ’70s,” and “it has a killer title.”Adjmi has been working on the play for a decade; he said the idea first came to him while he was listening to a Led Zeppelin song on a plane and wondering what it would have been like to be in the studio when they were recording it.“I saw it in my mind’s eye, and I thought, this could be a great idea for a play,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about the recording process, but I would talk to experts and try stuff out.”The process, which included inviting engineers to comment on the script as it evolved, resulted in a high level of verisimilitude, down to the details of a much-praised set by David Zinn.The production is directed by Daniel Aukin; the entire Off Broadway cast, including Will Brill, Juliana Canfield, Tom Pecinka, Sarah Pidgeon and Chris Stack as the musicians, as well as Andrew R. Butler and Eli Gelb as the engineers, is expected to transfer to Broadway.The show will be capitalized for up to $4.8 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is being produced by Sue Wagner, John Johnson, Seaview, Sonia Friedman Productions, Linden Productions, and Ashley Melone & Nick Mills. More

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      Review: In ‘Stereophonic,’ the Rock Revolution Will Be Recorded

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      David Adjmi’s riveting new play, with songs by Will Butler, is about a ’70s band that nearly destroys itself making an epochal album.It’s an imperfect rule of thumb that musicals lift up and dramas drill down. So what do you call David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” which does both?You could rightly say it’s a play with music, emphasis on the “play”: In a little more than three hours it features just six songs, some of them fragmentary.But that would be to shortchange the ingenious way Adjmi weaves sound and story into something as granular as it is operatic. Granular because the songs (by Will Butler) are not decorations but are elemental to the plot, in which the five members of a rock band spend a year of the mid-1970s writing and laying down tracks for an epochal new album while bickering over each riff and tempo. Operatic because what they wind up recording, however refracted through a commercial pop lens, inevitably expresses their heartache, betrayal and fury.There is plenty of each in “Stereophonic,” which opened on Sunday at Playwrights Horizons in a relentlessly compelling production by Daniel Aukin that has the grit of a documentary. In a way, it is one: If you know anything about the year Fleetwood Mac spent making the 1977 album “Rumours,” you will grasp the template at once, even though Adjmi has said he was inspired by many bands of the era after listening to Led Zeppelin on a flight to Boston.Nevertheless, the bones are Fleetwood Mac’s. Like Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, the play’s Diana and Peter are an American couple, she on vocals, he on vocals and guitar. Like John and Christine McVie, the fictional Reg and Holly are British, he on bass guitar, she on keyboard and vocals. And like Mick Fleetwood himself, Simon is the drummer, playing Daddy to the others while missing his wife and actual children back home.That they all behave childishly once aesthetic arguments arise is a given of the milieu. The constant drinking, toking and dipping into a big bag of cocaine don’t help, even if it’s part of the job of the two overwhelmed engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler, hilarious) to keep the sessions going at any cost.Daniel Aukin’s relentlessly compelling production has the grit of a documentary, and David Zinn’s studio set is a multitrack wonder, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut something is already wrong when the band arrives at the studio in Sausalito, Calif.: The intimacy and blend so riveting in their music has not worked out as well in their lives. Reg (Will Brill, heartbreakingly unhinged) and Holly (Juliana Canfield) are evidently on the skids. Indeed, Reg is so cataclysmically strung out by the third day of recording he can barely walk; he looks like a drowned rabid squirrel. Holly and the rest of the band, who all live together in a house nearby, are past the breaking point of patience and exhaustion.Drugs and sleep deprivation are the accelerants here, exacerbating Reg and Holly’s flip-flops of affection while undoing the couples who at first seem properly glued. Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and Peter (Tom Pecinka) have been a couple for nine years, held together by mutual admiration and complementary flaws. (He’s a control freak and she’s insecure.) Even so, they too begin to crack. Peter’s volcanic temper erupts as Diana, gradually emerging as the group’s breakout star, gingerly tries to assert more independence.By the time Simon (Chris Stack, suavely coiled) announces that his wife has left him, we begin to adjust to the depths toward which Adjmi has quietly been leading us, beneath the expert polyphony of his overlapping dialogue, the keenly imagined naturalism of the setting — David Zinn’s studio set is a multitrack wonder — and the nervy patience necessary to let characters come to their own boil.Pidgeon and Pecinka are riveting as a couple whose relationship begins to crack during the protracted recording session.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat deep story is about the disaster of maleness, and thus of mating, behind the pop-rock revolution of the period. (The Bicentennial vibe is firmly established by Enver Chakartash’s late-hippie costumes, including some wild peacockery for Simon.) And though Adjmi’s depiction of the men as stunted adolescents at first seems lightly satirical — the casual thumbing of Playboy in the control room, the engineers high-fiving each other over shared fantasies of oiled-up women reclining on Corvettes — the atmosphere eventually turns menacing.When challenged, Peter, who fancies himself (and may be) the band’s best musician, rigidly defends a fraying idea of what you might call monaural masculinity. Women are accomplices, not equals: incomprehensible witches, strange in their sisterliness (the men are Cains and Abels) and artists only accidentally.To the extent that “Stereophonic” dramatizes a victory of any kind it is in the way Diana (Pidgeon is riveting in all aspects of the role) inches herself away from Peter (Pecinka, too, is riveting) and at last defies him. Not without a price, of course. Another of Adjmi’s main interests here is in the tricky duality of music and, by extension, of art. However cathartic, writing and performing do not fix anything, the soul being too complicated for that. “I thought I was getting things out with the music because it’s so expressive and exhausting, but you don’t,” Diana laments. “It’s just a trick, all the conflict gets like submerged and hidden in some other weird pocket of your psyche.”Or as Holly, beguilingly cool in Canfield’s portrayal, sums up: “It’s a torture to need people.”Adjmi, first known for plays like “3C” and “Marie Antoinette” that push satire past the gates of surrealism and then push even further, works a new path here, after some years away from the stage. He is still very funny but now without the quotation marks, devoting himself in every playwriting way — thematically, dialogically, structurally — to real things emerging in real time. “Stereophonic” may even be slightly attenuated by its refusal to take shortcuts; I wouldn’t have minded a 20-minute trim, if only to keep the material from falling, as it does occasionally, into the gap between drama and mini-series. (It would make an excellent mini-series, though.)The discipline is otherwise unexceptionable. Aukin’s staging, which carefully tracks the different worlds of the control room downstage and the sound room, protected by glass, behind it, supports the variations on revelation and concealment that make the play so compelling. Sometimes the control room is silent and we hear only the sound room, sometimes it’s the other way around; sometimes there’s dialogue between them on mics and sometimes a mic is surreptitiously left live to spy on people in an isolation booth. And though superior work from the sound designer, Ryan Rumery, and the lighting designer, Jiyoun Chang, help direct our ears and eyes, we have to assemble the story ourselves.I don’t really understand how the cast (under the music direction of Justin Craig) did the same, but backward and from the inside out, all while playing their own instruments and singing richly enough to sell Butler’s songs. Whether barnburners with chunky hooks or dreamy reflections with rangy lyrics, those songs sound every bit like the pop hits they are meant to be — perhaps not a surprise from a former member of Arcade Fire, but a joy nonetheless.So however you want to categorize “Stereophonic” — perhaps a playical? — the great thing is that it doesn’t founder, as most theatrical treatments of the artistic process do, on either side of the genre divide. The music justifies the long buildup, and the play, Adjmi’s best so far, is as rich and lustrous as they come. You could even call it platinum.StereophonicThrough Nov. 26 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes. More

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      ‘Stereophonic’ Finds Drama in a ’70s Rock Recording Booth

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      The playwright David Adjmi explores the in-studio creation process in a play with new songs by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler.A decade ago, the playwright David Adjmi was listening to music on a flight to Boston when Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” came on. The tune was familiar — he used to overhear his brother play it in his room — but he really listened to it that day, and became mesmerized by Robert Plant’s scorching vocals.“I was like, ‘God, this must have been so crazy in the studio because it’s so electric and so Dionysian and all over the map, emotionally, and raw,’” Adjmi said. “I saw the studio, I saw the whole thing in my head. Then I started thinking about the theatrical opportunities for setting a play in a studio, and how to play with sound.”That seed of an idea turned into “Stereophonic,” which is now in previews at Playwrights Horizons and is his first New York production since “Marie Antoinette” in 2013.The play’s action takes place in a recording studio, and the actors play their own instruments and sing.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesAs Adjmi (“Elective Affinities,” “3C”) envisioned on that plane, the action unfolds in a recording studio, where a rock band’s protracted work on an album straddles a year from 1976-77. “It really is like the process and the play are blurring because these people are in a studio forever,” Adjmi, 50, said. “And we’ve been doing this — we almost talk about it like it’s a cult, because we just kept doing this over and over for years.” (In a 2020 interview, he mentioned talks for a Broadway run; they did not pan out.)Adjmi was taking a lunch break between rehearsals at the theater, sitting with the director Daniel Aukin (“Fool for Love”) and the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, who wrote several songs for the play’s fictional quintet. The idea was enough for them to sign on, and Butler, who now leads Will Butler + Sister Squares, had to wait years for the script to be completed before he could begin the songs. “The music is all reverse-engineered,” he said. “It was like, ‘Here’s a space that people are arguing about — how do you fill it so that the details of what they’re arguing about is accurate?’ It’s a very puzzle-piece way to compose the music.”Since the band is meant to be entering stardom (its previous album is hitting a belated stride in the play), its material has to sound as if it could top the Billboard charts, which put extra pressure on Butler, 41. “What a stupid idea to have them play the song,” he said, as his collaborators cracked up. “You’re not supposed to have them play the song, you idiot!”At this point it should be emphasized that “Stereophonic” is a play with music rather than a musical, making it somewhat of an oddity in an American theatrical landscape that has not much milked the rock scene’s dramatic potential. Adjmi said he thinks that’s “because we are the originator of the Broadway musical and there’s a very kind of calcified idea of what musicals are and how music should feel in the theater.” He added, “And I have an allergy to a lot of it. Not all of it, but a lot of it, because I can’t relate.”Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka as one of the band’s couples, partners and rivals in love and songwriting.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe musicals he did praise are backstage classics — “A Chorus Line,” “Dreamgirls,” “42nd Street” — and, perhaps not coincidentally, “Stereophonic” is a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creation. Its unnamed band includes two couples. The steady, no-nonsense keyboard player and singer, Holly (Juliana Canfield, who played Kendall Roy’s assistant Jess on “Succession”), and the substance-abusing bassist, Reg (Will Brill), both British expats, are separated at the start of the show. The singer Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and the guitarist-producer, Peter (Tom Pecinka), both Americans, are partners and rivals in love and songwriting. As for the British drummer, Simon (Chris Stack), he makes the most of his wife’s absence.All of this and a mid-70s California setting might evoke the rather popular band famous for “Rhiannon” and “Go Your Own Way,” but “Stereophonic” is not a play à clef about Fleetwood Mac. “There’s something about the mythos behind various bands that is in the culture,” Aukin said. “It’s almost using snippets from various bands’ histories and the histories of making some of these famous albums and using it as a sort of distant echo. We talked about many bands but we never talked about one.”In a phone interview, Canfield, 31, recalled that when she asked Adjmi for reference material, he recommended Keith Richards’s memoir, “Life,” and “Original Cast Album: Company,” the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the fraught, stressful recording that preserved Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 musical for posterity.That film closely tracked the “Company” actors as they painstakingly performed take after take or made tiny pronunciation changes, while members of the producing team and Sondheim himself watched, gave notes and rolled their eyes. “Stereophonic” also plunges us into the middle of the action as David Zinn’s set features the mixing table in the foreground and the recording booth in the back. A pair of engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler, no relation to Will) take in both the personal clashes and the mix of inspiration and drudgery involved in art-making — all of which, of course, constantly feed off one another.In real life, arguments about adjusting levels or when to use a click track might make even a Steely Dan fan’s eyes glaze over. But the show does not sweep the grind of creation under the rug, especially as Peter evolves into an obsessive taskmaster. “God is in the details, but the details are boring in themselves,” Adjmi said. “So I took that as a challenge, like, ‘OK, let me see if I can turn this into something dramatically exciting.’ So much of it, the banality of the process, is part of what’s so beautiful about it, the granularity of it.”Adjmi said he sought to “reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles.” The play opens on Oct. 29.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the technical elements, Adjmi and Aukin consulted experts like their show’s sound designer, Ryan Rumery, and the longtime Steve Reich collaborator John Kilgore. Butler himself proved to be a ready source about interpersonal relationships among musicians. “My last band was with my brother and his wife and my new band is with my wife and her sister,” he said. “I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real.’”That naturalism is different stylistic territory for Adjmi, whose previous plays tended to be arch in a manner he described as “expressionist.” The new show has more of a fly-on-the-wall quality. “That was an experiment for me: Can I reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles,” Adjmi said. “ I wanted to do something that would be more fun for them.”Perhaps, but his writing remains dense, with challenging, precisely timed overlaps in the dialogue. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the play is about music and about the cooperation of a group of people making it together, because the play itself, excluding the music, feels very scored,” Canfield said.As if that weren’t enough, the cast members who are in the band also have to play their own instruments and sing as well as convey the excesses that the 1970s were famous for. “I have a couple of scenes where I go from being really emotionally devastated and quite inebriated to walking into the music room and playing something very precise on the bass,” said Brill, whose credits include Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” and Jack Serio’s “Uncle Vanya” in a loft. “To keep the emotional and interpersonal dynamics running, and keep the verisimilitude of a drunk person, while executing something technically perfectly is a real challenge. It’s a delightful challenge, too,” he continued.“I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real,’” Butler said.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the production to work, the actors must feel like a believably tight unit. “We’re trying to make a band here — it’s not like, ‘Open your score to Page 6,’” Butler said. “We’re trying to figure out people’s strengths and weaknesses, because that’s what a band is. When they start playing music together, there is some connection.”Fortunately, the actors said, they all clicked. “When all of us get in the room together, the sounds of the voices blend incredibly well and there’s a real sense of camaraderie amongst us,” said Brill, 37, who played guitar in another fictional band a decade ago, in the David Chase film “Not Fade Away.” Canfield recalls that one day the show’s music director, Justin Craig, overheard her, Pecinka and Pidgeon bickering about their harmonies, and joked that they were now a real band because they were arguing about the music.As realistic as that episode must have felt, it pales when compared to the toughest credibility test the would-be rockers have had so far. Last month, Butler asked the “Stereophonic” band to open for him at his record-release gig in Brooklyn. Canfield, dreading what she called “an ego death” fiasco, balked, and Brill had to joke-taunt her into it.“He said ‘Yeah, Juliana, it’s going to be such a good story in 20 years, when we tell people that we almost opened for Will Butler’s band but we didn’t because we were scared that we would be bad,’” she said. “And I was like, OK, screw you, I guess we’re doing it.” Now that’s rock ’n’ roll. More

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      ‘Teeth’ Adaptation and ‘Stereophonic’ in Playwrights Horizons New Season

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      The company’s 2023-24 lineup includes works by Michael R. Jackson, Anna K. Jacobs, David Adjmi and Will Butler of Arcade Fire.Playwrights Horizons will present three large-scale productions and three solo works as part of its eclectic lineup for its 2023-24 season, with a range of genres and price points, the company announced on Tuesday.“These last few years are still asking us to pivot and be creative in ways we didn’t know we’d be asked to be,” said Adam Greenfield, the artistic director for Playwrights Horizons, who added that the company has had to scale back on producing new and commissioned works because of budgetary constraints.“Our job is to put as much new writing as possible in front of people,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out how to do more with less.”“Teeth,” based on the horror comedy film about an evangelical teenage girl with toothed genitalia — which the critic Stephen Holden called a “twisted sex-education film,” “quasi-feminist fable” and an “outrageous stunt” — will make its stage premiere in February.The musical production, which has been in the works since before the pandemic, and which Greenfield called “an examination of ancient misogyny,” is written by Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”) and Anna K. Jacobs, and will be choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly and directed by Sarah Benson, who will soon be leaving her leadership role at Soho Rep.“It’s bigger than any room that can try to contain it,” Greenfield said. “It’s incredibly fun and incredibly irreverent and brilliantly stupid and stupidly brilliant.”The season will kick off in October with the world premiere of David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” with original music by the Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, about a band whose members keep clashing while creating a new album. Set over two recording sessions, with fragments of the in-progress songs teased throughout, the show is “a valentine and a cautionary tale to the act of creation itself,” Greenfield said.The 2023-24 season will also feature three solo works written and performed by the playwrights. Milo Cramer’s “School Pictures,” which premiered at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in November, is a musical journal of song-poems that present a portrait of the New York City education system. Alexandra Tatarsky’s “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” which recently ran at the Abrons Art Center, is a clown cabaret about a young woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree. The comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu will perform his stand-up act, “Amusements,” a mix of storytelling, music and multimedia, which will also make an appearance at Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer.Presented in repertory, the solo performances will begin previews in November; tickets will be offered at a discounted rate.Rounding out the season is Abe Koogler’s “Staff Meal,” a comedic play, directed by Morgan Green, about a wait staff working to keep service running smoothly at a mysterious New York City restaurant while the world falls apart. Previews begin next April.Playwrights Horizons will also present a slate of programming with the Movement Theater Company, a troupe dedicated to developing and producing new work by artists of color. The residency begins in May 2024.“I think people are craving variety,” Greenfield said. “This new season speaks to that cultural shift.” More