Playwrights Horizons Announces 2024-25 Season; Premieres from Jordan Harrison, Ryan J. Haddad and More

The Playwrights Horizons 2024-25 season is set, featuring premieres from Francesca D’Uva, Ryan J. Haddad, Jordan Harrison, Gabriel Kahane, Sarah Mantell and more.

The season will open with Book of Travelers/Magnificent Bird by the concept-album composer (and frequent Sufjan Stevens collaborator) Gabriel Kahane, a duo of intimate solo musical plays, performed on alternate nights, blending songwriting and storytelling. Book of Travelers recounts the strangers Kahane met on a 9,000-mile train journey through a divided America; Magnificent Bird chronicles the year he spent entirely off-line, and the unexpected turbulence of living quietly. Annie Tippe directs the production, which opens at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in September.

In October, the playwright Sarah Mantell makes their off-Broadway debut with In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot. Part love story, part speculative fiction, the play follows a band of queer warehouse workers as they travel from job to job, running from the encroaching coastline. For their tale of queer aging, chosen family and the search for home in a volatile world, Mantell recently won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Sivan Battat directs at the Mainstage Theater.

Taking over the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in November will be the premiere of a new work written and performed by the experimental comedian Francesca D’Uva and directed by Sam Max. A fusion of stand-up and original digital-pop bangers, This Is My Favorite Song is a musical fever dream about sex, grief, nannying and Shakira.

The Antiquities, a new play from Marjorie Prime writer Jordan Harrison, unfolds in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities, whose curators are fiercely committed to bringing a lost civilization to life again: What were humans really like? What did they wear, what did they eat, how did they die out? Set in the far future in order to offer an uncanny view of the present moment, the play comes to the Mainstage Theater in January 2025.

April will see the premiere of Hold Me in the Water, a solo play written and performed by Ryan J. Haddad, whose Dark Disabled Stories was named Best New American Play at the 2024 Obie Awards. The new work concerns the passion and intimacy of first love: When Ryan falls for a man he just met, he’s ready for the romance of his dreams. But as their connection grows, Ryan learns that new heights of joy can bring deep insecurities to the surface. The play will be directed by Danny Sharron in the Mainstage Theater.

Additionally, a spring 2025 production will be announced this summer.