A new series at New Georges asks playwrights to write the impossible

For a playwright, it’s the dramaturgical equivalent of a blank check: a theatre company asking for a piece, or at least the beginnings of a piece, with a big cast, a berserk structure, and as unwieldy a setting as you can possibly imagine.

This was the offer that four playwrights couldn’t refuse when New Georges, an acclaimed company that focuses on female writers, came calling. The Germ Project, which opened last week at 3LD Arts and Technology Center, showcases the products of these four scribes’ newly unfettered imaginations.

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As you enter Second Stage on 43rd Street, you might get the sensation of being ten blocks south at Madison Square Garden. Hip-hop music booms, glitzy t-shirts are for sale, and a WWE-style wrestling ring sits center stage, all awaiting The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a new play by Kristoffer Diaz that premiered last year at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater and was recently named as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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“With The Duchess of Malfi, Red Bull Theater continues staging overlooked classics”

What makes for exciting classical drama? For Red Bull Theater, the answer isn’t found in returning to or reinterpreting the Bard’s best-known works. Instead, the company’s formula begins with seeking out the rarely aired works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: currently, with their production of John Webster’s Jacobean masterpiece The Duchess of Malfi.

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