Second Stage Theater to present 'The Thanksgiving Play' on Broadway, 'Camp Siegfried' off Broadway
The shows join Between Riverside and Crazy in Second Stage's 2022-23 season.
Second Stage Theater has added two new productions to its 2022-23 season. In fall 2022, Tony nominee Bess Wohl's play Camp Siegfried will make its New York premiere off Broadway, and in spring 2023, Larissa FastHorse's The Thanksgiving Play will make its Broadway debut.
The Thanksgiving Play will be staged at the Hayes Theater and make FastHorse the first female Native American playwright to ever have a show on Broadway. Her satirical comedy follows a theatre troupe who plans to put on a culturally sensitive Thanksgiving show for a school, aiming to actually give voice to Native Americans. But lots of social issues get raised when they can't find any Native American performers. Hadestown Tony winner Rachel Chavkin directs the Second Stage production.
The show premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2018, and the four-star New York Theatre Guide review of The Thanksgiving Play notes, "Not being able to get her plays produced, as it required casting Native American actors and the theaters interested in producing her work don't have access to that talent pool (if indeed it does exist at all), Ms. FastHorse charged herself with the exercise of writing a play about the Native American experience without having to cast Native Americans. She succeeded."
Off Broadway, Camp Siegfried will play the Tony Kiser Theater, directed by The Band's Visit Tony winner David Cromer. Set at the real Long Island summer camp of the title, the show follows two teenagers who fall for each other there in the 1930s, but at the camp, they're exposed to a fascist belief system that proves equally seductive.
Wohl's play had its world premiere in London at The Old Vic, and the four-star London Theatre review reads that the London director "cleverly uses the show as a parallel seduction to the camp's radicalisation, theatrical trappings twisting our sympathies. Wohl's message, lent a terrible urgency by our current political landscape, comes blazing through: we must not sleepwalk into this again."
Casting and exact run dates for The Thanksgiving Play and Camp Siegfried have yet to be announced.
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