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Labor Day means something different to Colm Summers, the new artistic director of Working Theater, a New York company about to launch its fortieth season as (in the words of their mission statement) “a professional theater for, about and with working people.” – the only such theater in New York.
Summers seemed exactly the right person to ask the question that I ask every Labor Day, which is a legal holiday created by Congress in 1884 to celebrate neither sales nor barbecues but the American labor union movement: Where are the American plays about labor — about workers, or workplaces, or unions? Read More
The University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), Working Theater and the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, have announced a new partnership launching with a fellowship program supporting the development of Working Theater’s “La Dureza” project, a powerful exploration of the lives and struggles of delivery workers in New York City. Created in solidarity with Los Deliveristas Unidos (Worker’s Justice Project), the new work by Ed. Cardona Jr. (“La Ruta,” New York Times Critics Pick) will examine delivery cyclists’ efforts to organize for fair wages, workplace safety, and human dignity….read more.
By Gabriela Geselowitz
This was not Reynaldo Piniella’s typical gig. It was 2018, and he was on a stage in front an audience of doormen, security officers, window cleaners – members of the SEIU-32BJ union, some of whom had never been to the theatre. The play was serving as live sexual harassment training – Piniella and his castmates depicting a scenario in which a woman was catcalled on the job. The audience was riled up, and some of them started heckling the harasser….read more.
On the afternoon of February 24, in the basement of the Hudson Park Library in lower Manhattan, a crowd of workers gathered to see a play. Laura Neill, the playwright, greeted attendees, and friends excitedly exchanged hellos as they waited for the performance to begin. There was something unusual about this read-through…read more.