B'way Update: Downstate and Blueberries

Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman
in Downstate at Playwrights Horizons.
Credit: Joan Marcus

Two plays which had critically acclaimed Off-Broadway runs, Bruce Norris' Downstate and Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich's Here There Are Blueberries, have announced Broadway engagements. Downstate will play the Booth Theater this fall (no specific dates have been posted), according to the Chicago Tribune, while Blueberries will start previews at the Barrymore Theater on Nov. 2 and open on Nov. 9. 

Downstate, Norris' play about four men convicted of sexual offenses living in a group home, opened at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater in 2018, played London in 2019, then opened Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2022, and Washington DC in 2025. The New York Drama Critics Circle voted it the Best Play of the 2022-23 season. This Broadway edition will be a new staging, directed by Tony winner Joe Mantello. (The previous productions were directed by Pam McKinnon.) The Tribune also reports that Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman, veterans of the Chicago, London, and NYC versions, will repeat their roles. 

During Downstate's DC run, conservative politicians slammed the play for its humanistic portrayal of sex offenders. Norris stated before the NYC run, “A depiction of something is not an endorsement. But, I do think that witnessing the lives of characters on stage encourages identification, and if you spend two hours in the company of a group of sex offenders, do you emerge from the experience with your certainty about them momentarily disrupted? The goal is not to forgive, but rather to complicate an easy and casually cruel response.”

Kathleen Chalfant, Nemuna Ceesay,
Jonathan Raviv, and Elizabeth Stahlmann in
Here There Are Blueberries at NYTW.
Credit: Matthew Murphy

Blueberries is Tectonic Theater Project's documentary dramatization of the discovery of a book of photographs of Nazi officials and staff of a concentration camp enjoying themselves in leisure activities. The play opened at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022 and played Off-Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop in 2024. It subsequently was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won a Lortel Award for Best New Play. 

Says Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project Executive Director Matt Joslyn in a statement: “For Tectonic Theater Project, bringing Here There Are Blueberries to Broadway is the culmination of a remarkable journey. These photographs hold a mirror up to our humanity in the most intimate and unsettling way. We have to look at them—not to understand the people in the pictures, but to better understand ourselves.” 

Both shows deal with facing uncomfortable figures and show a trend towards mining Off-Broadway for Broadway dramatic productions. There are only four totally new plays planned for the Main Stem this season and 12 play revivals.

Dark Disabled Stories and Downstate Among 67th Obie Winners

Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman
in Downstate.
Credit: Joan Marcus

Dark Disabled Stories, Downstate, and The Comeuppance were among the winners of the 67th annual Obie Awards, presented by the American Theater Wing on Jan. 27 for excellence in Off and Off-Off-Broadway theater. The official 67^th Obie Awards season includes shows that opened between September 1, 2022 through August 31, 2023. 

This year instead of a live ceremony, the Obies were presented on NY-1's On Stage program. In lieu of the annual awards ceremony, the American Theatre Wing dedicated funds to the support and growth of the artists, by bestowing winners with grants ranging from $1,000-5,000.

The winners of The 67^th Obie Awards are:

 
BEST NEW AMERICAN PLAY

• Ryan J. Haddad, Dark Disabled Stories (The Bushwick Starr | The Public Theater)

PLAYWRITING

• Hansol Jung, Wolf Play (MCC Theater | Soho Rep | Ma-Yi Theater Company)
• Bruce Norris, Downstate (Playwrights Horizons | Steppenwolf Theatre Company |National Theatre)

DIRECTION

• Dustin Wills, Montag (Soho Rep), Wet Brain (Playwrights Horizons and MCC Theater), and Wolf Play (MCC Theater | Soho Rep | Ma-Yi Theater Company)
• Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Public Obscenities (Soho Rep | National Asian American Theatre Company)
• Faye Driscoll, Weathering (New York Live Arts)

 
SUSTAINED ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTING

• Eric Ting, The Far Country (Atlantic Theater Company) and The Comeuppance (Signature Theatre Company)
• Pam MacKinnon, Downstate (Playwrights Horizons | Steppenwolf Theatre Company| National Theatre)

Updated 2013-14 Broadway/Off-B'way Schedule

Laurie Metcalf will star in
Bruce Norris's new play Domesticated.

Here's an expanded look at the 2013-14 New York theater season including Broadway and Off-Broadway. Most exciting on the Off-Bway horizon: the musical based on Little Miss Sunshine; Jeff Goldblum and Laurie Metcalf in Bruce Norris's new play Domesticated; and Mr. Burns, a weird play from Anne Washburn about a post-apocalyptic future with no electricity where people re-enacted episodes from The Simpsons for entertainment. I read the script for the American Theater Critics Association's New Play Award last year and I can hardly wait to see how it looks staged. This list is by no means complete. I'll add updates as we go along.   

July 14--Luis Bravo's Forever Tango (Walter Kerr)
July 24--Let It Be (St. James)
Aug. 4--First Date (Longacre)

Aug. 8—The Great Society (Clurman Theatre)
Aug. 15--Soul Doctor (Circle In the Square)

Sept. 12—The Old Friends (Signature Theatre Company)

Sept. 12—Fetch Clay, Make Man (NYTW)

Sept. 15--Mr. Burns, a Post-Electronic Play (Playwrights Horizons)
Sept. 19--Romeo and Juliet (Richard Rodgers)
Sept. 26--The Glass Menagerie (Booth)
Oct. 5--Big Fish (Neil Simon)
Oct. 10--A Night with Janis Joplin (Lyceum)
Oct. 20--A Time to Kill (Golden)
Oct. 24--The Snow Geese (Samuel Friedman)
Nov. 3--Betrayal (Barrymore)
Nov. 3--After Midnight (Brooks Atkinson)

Nov. 4—Domesticated (Mitzi Newhouse/Lincoln Center)
Nov. 10--Twelfth Night/Richard III (Belasco)

Nov. 12—The Patron Saint of Sea Monsters (PH/Peter Sharp)
Nov. 17--The Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (Walter Kerr)

Nov. 18—Small Engine Repair (Lortel/MCC)
Nov. 21--Macbeth (Vivian Beaumont)

Nov. 21—The Commons of Pensacola (MTC/City Center Stage I)
Nov. 24--Waiting for Godot/No Man's Land (Cort)
Mid-Nov.--Little Miss Sunshine (Second Stage)
TBA--The Winslow Boy (American Airlines)

Dec. 8 or 9—The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence (Playwrights Horizons)
Jan. 16--Machinal (American Airlines)
Jan. 23--Outside Mullingar (Samuel Friedman)
Mid-Feb.--The Bridges of Madison County (Gerald Schoenfeld)

March 2—Stage Kiss (Playwrights Horizons)

March 18—Tales from Red Vienna (MTC/City Center Stage I)
March 23--Les Miserables (Imperial)
March 27--If/Then (Richard Rodgers)
April 11--Bullets Over Broadway (St. James)
April 17--Act One (Vivian Beaumont)

April 21—Your Mother’s Copy of the Kuma Sutra (PH/Peter Sharp)

May 5—The City of Conversation (Mitzi Newhouse/Lincoln Center)
Spring--The Real Thing (American Airlines)
Spring--Houdini (Theatre TBA)
Spring--Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Theater TBA)
Spring--Rocky (Winter Garden)
Spring--Holler If Ya Hear Me (Theater TBA)

June 9—Fly By Night (Playwrights Horizons)

June 17—When We Were Young and Unafraid (MTC/City Center Stage I)
Maybes for Broadway--All the Way, Disgraced, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Revisionist