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Gotham’s stage laborers aren’t just organizing existing workplaces; they’re also making their own, built on new models and partnerships. Read More.
At a time when theater is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority, the theater company Working Theater partners with labor unions to recreate a working-class theater for the 21st century. Read More.
In Colm Summers’s words, “The history of American theater is written in labor plays.”
As the Artistic Director of Working Theater, a New York-based company completely committed to creating theater specifically “for, about, and with working people,” Summers would be the one to know. Founded in 1985, Working Theater has led the way in the development of sliding-scale ticket initiatives and mobile performance units, all while championing the work of artists who may lack or have lacked access to theater. Read More.
Working Theater has announced its 41st Season, a year dedicated to expansion, creative risk, and deep community engagement. Following the success of its 40th anniversary year, the company is setting the stage for a new era with trailblazing programs designed to sustain both Working Theater and the broader American theater landscape. Read More.
Experimental theatre festival Under the Radar has announced the programming for its 2026 iteration. The festival will run January 7–25, featuring over 30 shows across New York City. Highlights of the programming include Elevator Repair Services’ Ulysses, Brokentalkers’ Bellow, and Kinoshita Kabuki’s Kanjincho. Read More.
Working Theater is proud to announce their 41st Season which focuses on a year of expansion, risk, and deep commitment to community-rooted theater. Fresh off the success of their fortieth anniversary season, Working Theater is setting the tone for the next era of the company, by trailblazing programs they hope will break ground to sustain not only Working Theater, but the American Theater for years to come. Read More.
Sliding-scale tickets. Mobile theater units. Deep partnerships with organizers. Working Theater is proving that art can be accessible – and part of the front line of the movement to keep communities intact. Read More.
Working Theater has named playwright Kallan Dana as this year’s Playwright in Residence. Over the course of the residency, Dana will develop her new play, Control, a timely work that takes audiences inside the high-stakes world of air traffic controllers. Read More.
Working Theater has revealed the 2025 recipients of the Mark Plesent Commission Fund: Max Garcia and Brian Francis Pickett. This year’s recipients will be mentored by two of the most visionary playwrights working today: Martyna Majok, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Cost of Living, and the internationally celebrated Naomi Wallace, known for her bold political work and global acclaim. Read More.
Notes app brainstorms and subway scrawlings, not to mention years of research and hard work—that’s what it takes for six emerging playwrights to get their latest pieces over the finish line. And at this month’s first ever Stage Left festival, the brainchild of Working Theater and Broadway Advocacy Coalition, they’ll stage readings of these works for the very first time. Held at Playwright Horizons, Stage Left is homing in on storytelling with a social justice bent, with all six plays—La Dureza, by Ed Cardona Jr.; Foot Wears House, by Laura Neill; Hit Machine, by Jon Caren, The Garbologists, by Lindsay Joelle; Date of Release, by Andrea Ambam; and The Hero U Took, by Pedro Rosario—developed in partnership with advocacy coalitions fighting for racial and economic justice. Read More.
Participants in Broadway Advocacy Coalition and Working Theater’s first-ever Stage Left Festival, a new platform for social justice-centered storytelling, have been announced. Six new works that fuse the power of theatre with the urgency of advocacy will be offered in the series. Each play has been developed in partnership with frontline organizations advancing justice in and beyond New York. Read More.
Produced by Working Theater and the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, the festival pairs new plays with an advocacy coalitions working at the frontlines of social change. Read More.
The Drama League and The Working Theater are co-presenting Liba Vaynberg and Dina Vovsi’s new play about migration and identity. Read More
If you’ve been to the theater lately, you may have looked around and wondered why theater audiences look so different from the communities that make up our neighborhoods and cities. The fact is that most New Yorkers — indeed, most Americans — never make it to the theater. As we approach the end of the year, we find ourselves reflecting on a critical question: Why isn’t the American theater working for most Americans? Read More
As Working Theater, New York City’s trailblazing working-class theater company, celebrates its 40th season, it is thrilled to announce a landmark year of programming, taking its mission “to make theater work for people who work,” further than ever before. Themed “The People, The Party, The Protest: 40 Years Towards a Working Theater,” this season doubles down on the company’s legacy of creating groundbreaking access to the arts, bridging theater and the labor movement, and stakes the claim that—now more than ever—working people are the audience of the American Theater’s future. Read More.
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.