Foreword by Maria Striar, Producing Artistic Director &
Co-Founder of Clubbed Thumb
Each play includes the playwright's biography and additional
material:
Piano by Will Arbery (2018, 2019)
Of Government by Agnes Borinsky (2017)
Men on Boats by Jaclyn Backhaus (2015, 2016)
Baby Screams Miracle by Clare Barron (2013)
Dot by Kate E Ryan (2010)
Slavey by Sigrid Gilmer (2008)
U.S. Drag by Gina Gionfriddo (2001)
Unusual Stories, Unusually Told features seven plays from Clubbed Thumb’s production history, representing some of the most adventurous American writers working today.
Will Arbery is a playwright from Texas + Wyoming + seven
sisters. His plays include Heroes of the Fourth Turning
(Playwrights Horizon, winner Drama Critics Circle for Best New
Play, 2019-20), Plano (Clubbed Thumb), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing
(New Neighborhood) and Wheelchair (3 Hole Press). He recently won a
Whiting Award for Drama, and is currently under commission from
Playwrights Horizons and Shadowcatcher Entertainment. He’s a member
of New Dramatists, The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, P73’s
Interstate 73, Colt Coeur, Youngblood, and an alum of Clubbed
Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group. His plays have been developed
at Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Horizons, NYTW, The Vineyard, SPACE
on Ryder Farm, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Cape Cod Theater
Project, The New Group, EST/Youngblood, The Bushwick Starr,
Alliance/Kendeda, and Tofte Lake Center. MFA: Northwestern. BA:
Kenyon College.
Agnes Borinsky is a writer and performer, originally from
Baltimore, currently living in Los Angeles. According to one
critic, she writes “very light, very weird comedies that cut
unexpectedly sharp.”
Her plays have been produced and developed by Clubbed Thumb,
Playwrights Horizons, Target Margin, i am a slow tide, Page 73,
Ensemble Studio Theatre, SPACE at Ryder Farm, the University of
Pennsylvania, Masrah Ensemble in Beirut, Son of Semele in Los
Angeles, Upstream Theater in St. Louis, and the Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council. She has written essays on sex, God, politics,
art, and gender for n+1, Tablet Magazine, Slate, Bitch, the LA
Review of Books, and others. Sasha Masha, her first young adult
novel, comes out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux Books for Young
Readers in 2020.
Jaclyn Backhaus is a playwright, cofounder of Fresh Ground
Pepper, and new member of The Kilroys. Her plays include Men On
Boats (New York Times Critics’ Pick, Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights
Horizons, published by Dramatists Play Service), India Pale Ale
(Manhattan Theatre Club, recipient of the 2018 Horton Foote Prize
for Promising New American Play), Wives (Playwrights Horizons), You
Across From Me (co-written with three other writers for the Humana
Festival), Folk Wandering (book writer and co-lyricist with 11
composers, Pipeline Theatre Company), and You On the Moors Now
(Theater Reconstruction Ensemble), among others. She was the 2016
Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Clubbed Thumb and she is
currently in residence at Lincoln Center. Backhaus holds a BFA in
Drama from NYU Tisch, where she now teaches. She hails from
Phoenix, Arizona, and currently resides in Ridgewood, Queens with
her husband, director Andrew Scoville and their son Ernie.
Clare Barron is a playwright and actor from Wenatchee,
Washington. Her play Dance Nation was a finalist for the 2019
Pulitzer Prize, the recipient of the 2017 Susan Smith Blackburn
award, and previously received the inaugural Relentless Award
(2015); the play received its world premiere at Playwrights
Horizons in 2018 and ran at the Almeida Theatre in London. Her play
You Got Older (2015 Obie award for Playwriting; nominee for 2015
Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play; finalist for the 2015
Susan Smith Blackburn Prize) received its world premiere through
P73 under the direction of Anne Kauffman and recently ran at
Steppenwolf. Her play Baby Screams Miracle was recently produced at
Woolly Mammoth Theatre, after having premiered as part of Clubbed
Thumb’s 2013 Summerworks Festival. Her play I’ll Never Love Again
was produced at the Bushwick Starr in 2016 and was a New York Times
Critics’ Pick. She is the recipient of the 2014-2015 Paula Vogel
Playwriting Award (Vineyard Theater), the 2014 P73 Playwriting
Fellowship; she has received Sloan commissions from MTC and EST,
and is also under commission to Lincoln Center Theater, and
Playwrights Horizons.
Kate E. Ryan is a San Francisco-based playwright, curator,
administrator and teacher. She is a member of the OBIE-winning
playwrights collective 13P, an Affiliated Artist with Clubbed
Thumb, former Co-Curator of the OBIE-winning performance series
Little Theatre at Tonic, former Co-Chair of the Soho Rep
Writer-Director Lab, and Co-Founder of Machiqq, a women's
experimental writing collective. Her work has been developed or
produced in the Bay Area by Crowded Fire, The Ground Floor at
Berkeley Rep, Just Theater, Playwrights Foundation, and Z Space,
and in New York City by Clubbed Thumb, The Flea, The
Ontological-Hysteric, Soho Rep, The Vineyard, and Target Margin.
Her plays include Bad Guy, Card and Gift, Close to You, Design Your
Kitchen, Dot, Everybody’s Dad, A Good Neighbor, Mark Smith, Science
is Close, and Women of Trachis (an adaptation of the Sophocles
play). Her career has received support from sources including the
Gerbode-Hewlett Foundations and California’s Creative Capacity
Fund. She has an MFA from Mac Wellman's program at Brooklyn College
where she received a MacArthur Graduate Scholarship.
Sigrid Gilmer makes black comedies that are historically
bent, totally perverse, joyfully irreverent and are concerned with
issues of identity, pop culture and contemporary American society.
Her work has been performed at the Skylight Theatre, Pavement
Group, Know Theatre of Cincinnati, Cornerstone Theater Company and
Highways Performance Space. She is a winner of the Map Fund
Creative Exploration Grant, the James Irving Foundation Fellowship
and is a USA Ford Fellow in Theatre.
Gina Gionfriddo is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for
Rapture, Blister, Burn (Playwrights Horizons; Hampstead Theatre in
London) and Becky Shaw (Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana
Festival; Second Stage Theatre; Almeida Theatre in London). Her
other plays include After Ashley (ATL’s Humana Festival; Vineyard
Theatre); Can You Forgive Her? at Boston’s Huntington Theatre and
U.S. Drag (in New York by Clubbed Thumb and the stageFARM.) She has
received an OBIE Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Susan Smith
Blackburn Prize, an Outer Critics Circle Award, The Helen Merrill
Award for Emerging Playwrights, and an American Theatre Critics
Association/Steinberg citation. She has written for the television
dramas “Law & Order,” “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” “Cold Case,”
“Borgia,” “The Alienist,” and “House of Cards.”
I've discovered so many of my favorite playwrights thanks to
Clubbed Thumb, and I keep going back to their shows because I want
to know who the most exciting new artists are. Theater in this
country would be much less interesting without Clubbed Thumb.
*Heidi Schreck, writer and star of What the Constitution Means to
Me (which originated in Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks).*
Clubbed Thumb is where the American theater is headed – it just
doesn’t know it yet.
*Amy Staats, playwright & actor*
To your cherished list of warm-weather city pleasures, you should
think about adding Summerworks. Now 23 years old, this staple of
the East Village culturescape…allows you to say you knew certain
rising playwrights before your friends did.
*Ben Brantley, New York Times*
A perfect summer show, a trick Clubbed Thumb seems to have
mastered. The Summerworks home at the Wild Project in the East
Village, with its garage-door entry open to the street, makes
seeing the plays seem like a friendly invitation instead of a
cultural duty.
*Jesse Green, New York Times*
As has become customary at Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Festival,
the cast, direction and design are top-notch, though it only costs
a pittance to get in. In terms of dollars per laugh, the value here
is extremely high.
*Helen Shaw, Time Out NY*
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