Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Paula Vogel Are Broadway Bound
Second Stage, a nonprofit with a focus on living American dramatists, said it will present works by the playwrights on Broadway this season.Second Stage, a nonprofit theater that focuses on work by living American writers, said it will present a well-known piece by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and a new work by Paula Vogel on Broadway this season.This fall, the company plans to stage “Appropriate,” Jacobs-Jenkins’s play about a family gathering in Arkansas disrupted by the discovery of a photo album filled with disturbing images.The play was staged in 2014 at the Signature Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit. Ben Brantley, then The Times’s chief theater critic, praised it as “remarkable and devious.”The new production, which is to begin performances in November and open in December at the Helen Hayes Theater, is to be directed by Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery”). Jacobs-Jenkins, a 2016 recipient of the so-called “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, is a two-time Pulitzer finalist, for “Gloria” and “Everybody,” and is also the author of “The Comeuppance,” now running at the Signature Theater in Manhattan. “Appropriate” will be the first play he has written to be staged on Broadway, although he contributed material to a recent Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.”Next spring, Second Stage plans to present a new play, not yet titled, by Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “How I Learned to Drive.” That play, to begin performances in March and open in April at the Hayes, is to be directed by Tina Landau, and is a family drama set in suburban Washington in 1962. Vogel is also the author of “Indecent,” which was produced on Broadway in 2017.Second Stage said that this fall it would also present an Off Broadway production of Jen Silverman’s new play, “Spain,” which is set in 1936, and concerns two filmmakers making a K.G.B.-backed movie about the Spanish Civil War. The production is to be directed by Tyne Rafaeli and to run at the Tony Kiser Theater beginning in November. More
