THE ORCHARD PROJECT ANNOUNCES THE ARTISTS SELECTED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE 2024 PERFORMANCE, EPISODIC, AUDIO, AND GREENHOUSE LABS
July 17, 2024 — The Orchard Project today announced the artists and companies selected to participate in its 2024 Summer Lab programs. The Orchard Project selected 30 projects and artistic teams from a competitive group of more than 1,000 that applied to participate in this year’s programs. The Orchard Project’s Labs supporting artists creating work for audio and TV will be hybrid, split between virtual workshops and programming in New York City and Los Angeles, allowing the Orchard Project to accelerate the work of innovative playwrights, screenwriters, and theater companies from a breadth of geographic locales. The Orchard Project is also announcing new participants in its annual Greenhouse program, supporting year-round development by a group of multidisciplinary artists in New York City.
“The Orchard Project’s unwavering support for artists makes a difference across the cultural landscape, whether you’re watching TV, listening to your favorite podcast, or going to a show. There is currently at least one Orchard Project alum involved in every single new play or musical on Broadway — and we can’t wait for this year’s Orchard Project artists to create with us and then share their stories with the world,” said Ari Edelson, The Orchard Project’s Founder and Artistic Director.
The Orchard Project will host four artist labs in 2024:
Performance Lab (theatre + live performance)
Episodic Lab (television)
Audio Lab (audio)
Greenhouse Program (cross-genre)
2024 PERFORMANCE LAB
This year’s Performance Lab highlights joyous new works and the diversity of approach and breadth of experimentation that characterize contemporary theatrical projects. Projects, companies, and artists selected to participate in the Orchard Project Performance Lab include:
Nick Blaemire, Ryan Miller, Lee Sunday Evans: Safety Not Guaranteed: Three disaffected magazine employees head out on an assignment to interview an unusual guy who placed a classified ad seeking a companion for time travel. Music and lyrics by Ryan Miller (of the band Guster) and book by Nick Blaemire. Based on the movie written by Derek Connolly.
Royal National Theatre, UK/Suhayla El-Bushra, Ahmed Gallab: Home Is Not A Country: Fresh from their collaboration on The Enormous Crocodile, Suhayla El-Bushra and Ahmed Gallab (AKA Sinkane) are exploring a musical stage adaptation of Safia Elhillo’s 2021 YA novel, Home Is Not A Country; a supernatural look at belonging, loss, and what it means to be part of the Sudanese diaspora.
TRIA Theatre/Seth Bockley, Jesse LaVercombe, Ahmed Moneka: Don Quixote on Highway 1: This theatre/film hybrid performance adapts Cervantes’ classic Don Quixote for the 21st century, mixing live video and film techniques with imaginative staging to tell an existentialist fable about two friends on a hilarious road trip to nowhere.
Ma-Yi Theatre/Ray Pamatmat, May Adrales: True / Story, based on a true story: Can you write a play about your estranged father dying during a global pandemic without it becoming trauma porn? Should you even try?
Miami New Playwrights: Miami-based playwrights Celeste Landeros, Juan Sanchez, Jessica Bashline, Ivan Lopez, will work with The Orchard Project alum Kenny Finkle for a week to develop new work in Saratoga, in partnership with the South Florida Theatre League.
Wenxuan Xue: mao mao: A solo performance that weaves in family oral histories, creation myths, folk songs, and Buddhist/Taoist rituals to rekindle ancestral spirits, queer lineage, and ecological entanglements.
Jonathan Reid Gealt, Dustin Sullivan, Kasey Merino, Madsie Flynn: Dust & Shadow: Based on the novel by Hugo-Award winning author Lyndsay Faye, DUST & SHADOW, is a Sherlock Holmes + Jack the Ripper thriller. This is a Sherlock for our time, still firmly rooted in its traditional, thrilling setting.
Kate Walat, GT Upchurch: The Haunting of Shirley Jackson: Legendary writer Shirley Jackson (“The Lottery”) is haunted by her past, present, and ever-disapproving mother Geraldine, as a mysterious Visitor appears in her Vermont garrett, beckoning her on a late-night drive, abandoning typewriter and all.
nicHi douglas, Josiah Davis: C’MON GOD, WHERE YOU AT?: Allegory meets Blaxploitation in this irreverently parodied adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of a Black Girl in Her Search for God.
Zeyn Joukhadar: The Thirty Names of Night: An Arab trans New Yorker in the process of choosing his name searches for a rare bird documented only by his late ornithologist mother and a mysteriously vanished Syrian bird artist, uncovering silences his community has kept in the name of survival and finding unexpected precedent for his own life.
Fiasco Theater: In 2024, The Orchard Project will be hosting its first Company in Residence, Fiasco Theater, for the majority of the season in Saratoga Springs. While in residence, Fiasco will develop a number of new productions, and lead classical training workshops, taught by esteemed members of their Conservatory faculty. Workshops are available to learners across experience levels and ages. Fiasco Theater’s residency in Saratoga Springs is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Writers and Composers in Residence: The Orchard Project is honored to host its second cohort of Writers in Residence and Composers in Residence as part of the Performance Lab in Saratoga Springs. The 2024 Writers in Residence include KJ Sanchez, Sarah Burgess, Franky Gonzalez, Liza Birkenmeier, and Cricket Brown. Composers in Residence include Jesse J Sanchez, Julian Hornik, Zack Zadek, and Anna DeNoia.
2024 EPISODIC LAB
“The 2024 Episodic Lab brings together a new cohort of writers pushing the boundaries of narrative form and seeking unique ways to explore the human experience in the television medium. Be it the struggles of growing up, the struggles of living your own life or the struggles of reckoning with the end of that life, the 2024 Episodic Lab artists find new ways to express our shared humanity on the screen with joy, with pathos and with honesty.”
– Maija Gustin and Jennifer Chambers, Episodic Lab Program Directors
Lianne Walden, The Pleasure Gap: A queer intimacy coordinator and college professor launches an escort service for women, inciting both liberation and outrage.
Elisa Manzini, The End-All: After helping her terminally ill boyfriend end his life, a shattered but determined medical director opens an illegal assisted suicide clinic that pits her against big pharma and politicians, and she’s forced to flee to Europe after killing the wrong person.
Helene Taylor, Chronicles of a Radioactive Girl Scout: After a childhood glance at the afterlife an unorthodox physicist is driven to prove its existence the only way she knows how: through science. But the closer she gets to the truth, the closer others get to uncovering a secret that will destroy everything she’s built.
Carey Crim, Triggered: A talented young psychotherapist, who survived a school shooting as a teenager, finds herself experiencing PTSD when she tries to help a new teen patient with the potential to be a school shooter himself.
Jordan Obey, Gumshoe Brooklyn: An aging private detective and the estranged son of his late partner work together to keep a failing investigation practice alive by solving oddball cases brought to them by the residents of Brooklyn, New York.
Katasha Acosta, Miami Rising: A trailblazing millennial Black LatinX woman takes charge of her family’s hotel empire, navigating a high-stakes expansion and a racial profiling scandal that threatens their legacy – and may compel her to confront her hidden identity.
Lisa Deng, Death Metal Demon Hunters: When a small town girl unearths her unexpected destiny as the descendant of the Chinese God of Music, she must learn to use the power of death metal to combat the horde of demons that have escaped from the hellmouth behind her house.
Kelby Guilfoyle Happy House: The adventures of a motley crew of puppet orphans growing up in a puppet orphanage
Amber McCain, The Vulture Club: A desperate surgeon is pulled into the lucrative and dangerous world of alternative healthcare.
Robert Cunningham, Laurels: A serialized half-hour comedy about a washed up, former child star who uses his con-artist younger cousin and a ragtag group of Chicago community college performers to help reignite his career
Nicole Martinez, Questing: An unlucky-in-love Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast dating in the big city vows to lose her virginity before her rapidly approaching 30th birthday.
Jose Sebastian Alberdi, Fenny Snake Flats: A trio of witches navigate daily life in an American frontier town all while the newly appointed sheriff will stop at nothing to make sure they’re dead.
2024 AUDIO LAB
“This year’s Audio Lab participants are thinking deeply about ways to move audio storytelling forward. It’s a quickly evolving medium, and these innovative artists have a keen sense of where it can go next. I’m looking forward to working with them and seeing how their ideas unfold.”
– Jerry Ruiz, Audio Lab Program Director
Liz Salazar, Clandestine: A 2nd-person audio drama that unfolds in motion, inviting you to immerse yourself in the role of a spy on covert missions while on a walk in the real world.
Stephen Trask & Aurin Squire: American Shtetl: A narrative podcast with music that follows David, a journalist who delves into his past when he goes home to his mother after his father passes away. On his journey he encounters ghosts, a history of New London he never knew, and secrets of his grandfather’s past that completely alter his understanding of his own life. Written by Stephen Trask and Aurin Squire with music by Stephen Trask.
Audrey Kaufman, bitches: When a woman switches bodies with her boyfriend’s new puppy, the trio’s lives are upended amid questions of ownership and obedience. It’ll take really wanting to be herself, in spite of all the thorns, and maybe even without her man’s love, to switch back.
Matt Harry, Codex Arcanum: After helping a hungry wendigo, a bubbly but impatient teenager is pulled into a secret war between sorcerers and anti-magic mercenaries.
Max Yu, Tankie Today: Set in a world where China’s Cultural Revolution didn’t end in 1976 and instead continues into 2030, Tankie Today is an intercom program in a Chinese re-education camp that instills socialist values while guiding prisoners through morning exercises.
Shoshanah Tarkow, The Untitled Ether Music Project: A true story of scientific inventions, music, love, spycraft, and resonance; spanning from secret Soviet laboratories, to sold-out concert halls in New York City, and told through the otherworldly music of Leon Theremin’s “Etherphone”.
Weston Eric Scott & Chris Lambert, Milkshake Duck: When a no-name, daydreaming duck gets catapulted to unintentional internet stardom, he strives to keep it at any cost before ensuring his cataclysmic fall.
The annual Audio Lab will again be facilitated by Jerry Ruiz.
2024-2025 GREENHOUSE LAB
“This year’s Greenhouse Lab cohort is an exciting mix of multi-disciplinary creators and groundbreaking storytellers, and I can’t wait to see how they learn from and inspire each other and grow together over the course of the year.”
– Ramona Rose King, Greenhouse Lab Program Director
La Daniella: playwright, actor/performer, puppeteer, puppet designer, teaching artist
Alicia Carroll: playwright, screenwriter, educator
Clarivel Ruiz: writer, director, actor
Lanxing Fu: theater artist, writer, performer
Lily Haje: deviser, director, dramaturg, and puppet enthusiast
Nina Ki: playwright, aerialist, drag king, maker of things
David Rosenberg: writer and actor
Milo Cramer: writer
Jaymes Sanchez: playwright, actor, educator
Grace Goheen: playwright, director
The Greenhouse Lab will once again be facilitated by dramaturg Ramona Rose King.
ABOUT THE ORCHARD PROJECT
The Orchard Project is a preeminent artistic development laboratory and accelerator for creators of performance and dramatic stories. Through programs in New York City, Saratoga Springs, and online, The Orchard Project inclusively supports and empowers dramatic storytellers from the United States and around the world. Through summer labs and other year-round programs that provide resources including community, accountability, and opportunity for artists at multiple stages of their careers, The Orchard Project pushes the dramatic form and lifts up a diversity of voices that inform, inspire, and provoke.
To date, OP has supported more than 1,500 resident artists, and maintained deep relationships with alumni, offering ongoing advice and resources for their work through OP Forward programs. Unlike other residency programs, The Orchard Project’s signature Labs embrace projects from a diversity of trajectories, forms, and aesthetics, and support both emerging and established artists. Theatrical works developed at The Orchard Project have gone on to production at a wide variety of theaters—from Broadway and the West End to independent theaters across the world. Recent and upcoming productions include We Are Your Robots (Rattlestick Theatre, TFANA, upcoming), Penelope (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival and Signature Theatre DC), A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (Baltimore Center Stage, Barbican Theatre, European Tour), Bhangin’ It/Bhangra Nation (La Jolla Playhouse, Birmingham Rep, UK), In the Green (LCT3), Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein (Public Theater, Court Theatre, National Tour), Amélie (Broadway), The Object Lesson (BAM Next Wave Festival, New York Theatre Workshop), and Savion Glover’s BaRoQUe’BLaK TaP CaFe (The Joyce). Audio stories formed at The Orchard Project have been presented on Audible, including the musical Row by Daniel Goldstein and Dawn Landes, and the upcoming series The Double[s] by Winnie Kemp. Television pilots like Amy Jephta’s The Park have been developed in OP’s Episodic Lab, with many other writers from the lab moving to writing positions and development opportunities across the industry. Various projects have gone on to live in multiple mediums, such as Laura Wade’s POSH and Robert Schenkkan’s All The Way, which had successful theatrical runs before becoming major motion pictures. Past Orchard Project residency companies include Tectonic Theater Project, The Royal Court, Elevator Repair Service, Public Theater, Pig Iron, The Rude Mechs, American Repertory Theater, Mabou Mines, and groundbreaking artists Jeremy O. Harris, Young Jean Lee, and Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, among others. Work developed at The Orchard Project has gone on to win awards including Obies, Drama Desks, Olivier Awards, and the 2014 Tony Award for Best Play for All The Way.
The core activities of The Orchard Project are a series of residency and artist support programs that occur in New York City and Saratoga Springs, NY. Programs include laboratories for theatrical plays and musicals, episodic content, and audio storytelling, as well as professional development labs focusing on diversity, inclusion, and leadership.
The Orchard Project’s 2024 Programming is made possible with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Upstate Theater Coalition for a Fair Game, The Richenthal Foundation, The Dake Family Foundation, TIAA-CREF Foundation, The Orchard Project Founders Club, and many individual donors.