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The Hat

@readthehat

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Off-Broadway’s craft, people & process.
We tell the stories of the people who tell stories.
🎩 Founded by @karacut & Colin

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The casts in Eliya Smith’s plays are shrinking.

First, Dad Don’t Read This—a New York Times Critic’s Pick about four girls trapped in the tempest of suburban adolescence.

Next, Biography, centering a trio of 20-somethings who’ve been relegated to the peripheries of their own lives, received a late-summer engagement with @isletheater in Maine.

Now, a two-hander.

Read @e.u.ekpo’s interview with @eliyasmith about the fall production of her newest play Two Girls, running from October 7 to November 29 @cherrylanetheatre

#offbroadway #theater #cherrylanetheatre by @readthehat

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"Theater is a laboratory for understanding lived experience, and a space to explore how we create a world we feel we can all live in." Check out Director Ari Laura Kreith and Playwright Jenny Lyn Bader in conversation with The Hat and this season Off Broadway!

MRS. STERN WANDERS THE PRUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY runs through October 25. by @readthehat

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“Virtuosically stupid does indeed speak to half of the things that we have done together. That spirit is genuinely really important.”

Read about Emma Rosa Went and Olivia Rose Barresi’s decade+ of collaboration in The Hat — then, get your tickets to DEGENERATES, their most recent project, now playing through November 1st. by @readthehat

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**LINK IN BIO** “People are desperate for theaters to channel their voices and not be afraid. Courage is infectious.” In this feature about a surge of politically themed theater off-Broadway for @readthehat, I spoke to theater-makers including Oskar Eustis, Lynn Nottage, Heidi Schreck, Steven Pasquale, Sahar Milani, Cameron Scoggins, Laura Zlatos, Jon Beavers, Anne Washburn, Crystal Finn, Dan Giles, Max Wolf Friedlich, Jenny Lyn Bader, Ari Laura Kreith, Katie Cappiello, Jay Wahl, and Ciarán O’Reilly about the place and power of politics on stage. #theater #politics #midterms #offbroadway #nyc by @readthehat

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Happy Hat Day! 🎩 It’s October and after a summer slumber, we are back — and so is fall theater season. Buckle up, we have some stories for you. Yes, YOU. Actors, producers, writers, directors, publicists, stage managers, box office saints, dramaturgs, audience members, and more.

@teemantim hit the phones to talk to @lynnnottage, Oskar Eustis, @stevepasquale, @laurazlatos, @djgiles47, @heidischreck, @annewashburn and many more about the role of political theater today.

What is the power of art and what is the power of storytelling?

The great @divaraven chronicles a bygone era of the East Village aughts and talks to @joeyariasnyc and @basiltwist3 about putting on their “couture gown of a show” again.

And they’re not! @ariaswithatwistnyc was just extended to December.

@emmarosawent and @obarresi55 have spent 10+ years working on 40 projects, including lots and lots of Shakespeare. They dive into their creative inspirations and bucket lists.

🐻❤️

@ethanevakaras goes into the mind of dramaturg @sarahlunnie, who worked on not one, two, three, but FOUR plays this and next season by @ryanjhaddad @eliyasmith @a_modern_classic @themadonesarchive.

Don’t miss the miracle.

Lots to read and even more to see. Btw we have exclusive Hat hats avail for close readers. Get in our DMs to get one. 🎩 by @readthehat

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“Our work is not always going to be about making sense of hard books,” says Leo Egger of @enoriverplayers. “The theater is the only place I know of — in my life — where I’ve had the experience that I’m looking at a mystery, staring at it, and I feel less alone somehow. I feel seen in some way.”

But their theater company *is* very good at making sense of hard books, first with “Twelve Minor Prophets” at @jackartsny earlier this year, and now “The Anatomy of Melancholy” playing at IATI Theater through June 6.

Egger and co-author Charlie Mayhew are leading with curiosity and a willingness to follow their interests and strange ideas.

In this week’s Spotlight, Douglas Corzine talks with the playwrights about turning Robert Burton’s 17th-century book into a playful Off-Off-Broadway meditation on the questions that never seem to go away. Ones like “Why are we so sad?”

Read the full story at the link in bio. 🎩

📝: Douglas Corzine — @dcorzine  📸: Samori Etienne, Ella Gillespie Bailey

#readthehat #offbroadway #offoffbroadway #theater by @readthehat

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What does it mean to choose a life in the arts? 👀

In The Emporium, a young man spends years trying to work at a mysterious department store called, well, The Emporium. Except the store isn’t just a store; playwright Thornton Wilder imagined it as a metaphor for art itself.

For The Hat, @shoshanacreates talks with playwright Kirk Lynn, who spent years combing through Wilder’s journals, drafts, and notes to complete the unfinished work for its Off-Broadway premiere at @classicstage

Read the full story at the link in bio. 🎩

📝: @shoshanacreates — Shoshana Greenberg
📷: @marcjfranklin — Marc J. Franklin

#readthehat #offbroadway #theater by @readthehat

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Something is happening at the Greenwich House Theater…

At performances of “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” @mothdaysplay — Wallace Shawn’s new play directed by André Gregory — audiences seemed unusually restless. There was coughing. There was fidgeting. Phone were dropped.

In this week’s Spotlight, Nora Logan traces the phenomenon through Freud’s theory of “the uncanny,” arguing that the play’s confessions about death, betrayal, sex, grief, and family may be striking something buried deep beneath the surface.

Maybe the cough is more than a cough.

“The cough, I’d argue, is the body’s way of managing the uncanny sensation,” Logan writes, “a small, socially acceptable convulsion in response to something that has jabbed the id.”

Read the full story at the link in bio. 🎩

📝: Nora Logan — @noraelogan
📷: Julieta Cervantes — @j_cervantes

#readthehat #offbroadway #theater by @readthehat

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What songs do we carry with us?

In Canciones, an immersive theatrical experience staged inside a Flatbush apartment, a Mexican-American family gathers to sing, argue, grieve, dance, and wrestle with a familiar immigrant question: Do you stay close to the people you love, or leave to pursue the life you imagine for yourself?

For this week’s Spotlight, Ana María Betancourt Ovalle writes about mariachi music, family reunions, inherited longing, and how dreams can become another form of belonging.

Read the full story at the link in bio. 🎩

📝: Ana María Betancourt Ovalle — @anamariabetancourto  📷: Jody Christopherson

#readthehat #offbroadway #theater by @readthehat

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The act of looking away sits at the center of James Clements’s unsettling new play, now at @thecelltheatre, about Leni Riefenstahl, the famed Nazi propagandist behind “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will.”

For our latest Spotlight, Joey Sims writes about political theater in a time of exhaustion, dissociation, and mounting daily horrors — and asks what responsibility artists and audiences bear.

Read the full story at the link in bio. 🎩

📝: Joey Sims — @joeysims89  📷: Alexia Haick — @alexia.haick

#readthehat #offbroadway #theater by @readthehat

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Not every ending is peachy or blue-sky. Read @colm_summers and @murphyderek94 in @readthehat on our distinctly Irish dark comedy dressed as a rom-com. by @readthehat

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