Plays & Musicals
The Wind and The Rain: a story about Sunny's Bar
(formerly Untitled Sunny's / Red Hook Project)
Site-specific immersive theatrical epic
Commissioned by En Garde Arts and The Vineyard Theatre
directed by and developed with Jared Mezzocchi
At the end of Conover Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on the waterfront, there is a bar called Sunny’s. For over one hundred years, it’s been run by one family, through booms and busts, prohibition and pandemics, blight and gentrification. It’s been home to dreamers and immigrants, artists, bootleggers, longshoremen, union bosses, corrupt police, numbers runners, bluegrass musicians, and hipsters. And to Tone Johansen, who fought to save it after Hurricane Sandy, against incredible odds.
Created by Obie Award winners Sarah Gancher (playwright) and Jared Mezzocchi (director), and commissioned by Vineyard Theatre and En Garde Arts, The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny’s Bar uses immersive design technology to bridge the past and present of Red Hook. Beginning at the Waterfront Museum barge and ending at Sunny’s Bar, this site-specific theatrical experience invites audiences to situate themselves within the history of a neighborhood, a family, a storied gathering place, and the currents of time and nature that have shaped it all.
(2W, 2M)
Development History
[2024] Premiere, co-production between Vineyard Theatre and En Garde Arts
at the Red Hook Waterfront Museum
[2024] Vineyard 2-Week Workshop
[2024] Dorset Theatre Festival Residency
[2024] Hermitage Artist Retreat Residency
[2024] Vineyard 3-Day Workshop
[2023] Residency at Andy's Summer Playhouse
[2023] Workshop with En Garde Arts
[2022] Residency at Bethany Arts
[2022] En Garde/Vineyard Residency in Red Hook
[2022] Stillwrights Retreat
[2023] NYSCA Fellowship
[2023] Venturous Foundation Finishing Commission
Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical
a bluegrass adaptation of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin
(and Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin)
Book, original music, and lyrics by Sarah Gancher
Commissioned by Dorset Theatre Festival
A bluegrass musical based on Eugene Onegin (both Pushkin’s novel-in-verse and Tchaikovsky’s opera.) In the late 40s, touring bluegrass musician Eugene finds himself stranded in his bandmate Lensky’s Arkansas hometown. There, he’s drawn to Tanya, a gifted young songwriter filled with romantic notions. Her declaration of love to Eugene turns a church hall dance into a drunken row that ends in murder and sets the characters spinning off into wildly different futures. Set in the simple world of post-war Arkansas and the tight-knit Grand Ole Opry community in 60s Nashville, Eugene Onegin explores what it is to build identities, dreams and communities through music. It’s structured as a jam session, where singer-musicians sit in a simple circle of chairs to tell their tale, with seats left open for audience members who might want to sit in.
(2W, 2M and bluegrass jam)
Development History
[2024] Workshop and showings at Dorset Theatre Festival
[2024] Workshop and showings at the Arkansas New Play Festival (with dramaturg Ken Cerniglia)
[2023] Workshop and public showings at The Orchard Project (dir. Jade King Carroll and Dina Vovsi)
[2023] Demo Cutting
[2023] Creativity Fund Workshop at New Dramatists (dir. Jade King Carroll)
[2022] Private Work-in-Progress Showing at Dorset Theatre Festival (dir. Jade King Carroll)
[2021] Commissioned by Dorset Theatre Festival
[2024] Finalist for Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre
Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy
At the infamous (real-life!) Internet Research Agency, professional internet trolls work 24-7 to influence American popular opinion, creating the illusion of consensus—or conflict. There are floors for twitter, for facebook, memes, fake news, and comments sections.
RUSSIAN TROLL FARM imagines the daily lives of these workers as they invent characters, stage conflicts, and create conspiracies. What happens to your grasp on the truth when your whole job is lying? How does your identity shift when you impersonate Americans for a living? Does anybody want Thai food? From Thai Palace or Thai Pavillion?
(2W, 3M)
Development History
[2024] Full in-Person Off-Broadway Production at NYC's Vineyard Theatre, in association with Dori Berinstein (dir. Darko Tresnjak)
[2023] Full In-Person Production at Geva Theatre (dir. Darko Tresnjak)
[2022] Full In-Person Production at Forward Theatre (dir. Jennifer Uphoff Gray)
[2020] Full Online Production at Theaterworks Hartford/Theater Squared/The Civilians (dir. Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson)
[2020] Online Workshop at TheaterSquared (dir. Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson)
[2019] Workshop and Reading at New Dramatists via the Play Time program (dir. Kip Fagan)
[2019] Workshop with New Dramatists (dir. Rachel Chavkin)
[2023] OBIE Award Special Citation
[2020] NY Times Best Theater of 2020 list
[2020] NY Times Critics' Pick
In development with Pine Tree Entertainment
Hundred Days
The Lucky Ones
Mission Drift
I'll Get You Back Again
A bittersweet comedy with music set in Berkeley. Struggling stand-up comedian Chloe is sitting in for her dead father as the bassist for his seminal psychedelic rock band. As rehearsals progress, Chloe finds herself navigating increasingly delicate emotional terrain as old conflicts flare up and old flirtations reignite.
By turns comic and tragic, scathing and tender, the play is a meditation on what we inherit from the sixties; the joys and frustrations of collaboration; and the search for transcendence in art and comedy.
(4 M, 2 W)
Development History
[2017] World Premiere at Round House Theatre (dir. Rachel Chavkin)
[2016] Workshop and Staged Reading at Seattle Rep's The Other Season (dir. Rachel Chavkin)
[2015] Workshop and Staged Reading at Steppenwolf's First Look Festival (dir, Rachel Chavkin)
[2014] Roundtable reading at The Lark (dir. Portia Krieger)
[2013] Workshop and Staged Reading, Ars Nova Out Loud series (dir. Rachel Chavkin)
[2016] Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival
[2016] Honorable Mention, the Kilroys' List
[2015] Wait List for The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep
[2015] Honorable Mention, The Kilroys' List
[2013] Finalist, Playwrights' Week at The Lark
[2013] Nominee, Playwrights of New York Fellowship
The Place We Built
In a deserted neighborhood in post-communist Budapest, young bohemians squat in an abandoned building and build a bar. Reclaiming the Jewish identity their parents' generation abandoned after the Holocaust, they create a vibrant new subculture that combines big ideas and intense debates with wild parties. Friendships form and fray, couples recombine, people change, the neighborhood is transformed. But when authoritarianism and antisemitism make a surprise comeback in the country at large, will the place they built survive? Part of the larger 7th project.
A tale of friendship, idealism, and coming of age, set against the backdrop of Hungary's current terrifying slide into dictatorship—and the global rise of right-wing populism.
(7W, 4M)
Development History
[2019] Newly updated draft read at New York Theater Workshop (dir. Danya Taymor)
[2016] World Premiere at the Flea Theatre Mainstage (dir. Danya Taymor)
[2015] Staged Reading in the Women's Voices Theater Festival with Mosaic Theatre of DC (dir. Eleanor Holdridge)
[2015] Workshop and Staged Reading with OPEN Festival, Jewish Plays Project (dir, Benjamin Kamine)
[2015] Workshop and Staged Reading with The Playwrights' Realm (dir. Benjamin Kamine) (Writing Fellows selection)
[2013] Workshop production at NYU’s Lee Strasberg Institute (dir. Portia Krieger)
[2018] Top 10, Jewish Play Project's Best of the First 10 Years
[2016] Winner, AR Gurney Prize
[2016] Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival
[2015] Top 10 for Jewish Playwriting Contest
[2015] Honorable Mention, the Kilroys' List
[2013] Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission.
Seder
Twenty-first century Budapest. The old headquarters of the Hungarian KGB has reopened as a museum dedicated to Communist atrocities. Retired typist Erzsike is eager to visit her old work place. That is, until she comes face to face with her own photograph on the museum’s Wall of Murderers—and learns her estranged daughter put it there. As Erzsike and her family wrestle with their history, deep secrets are revealed, big questions are raised, and the moral and political waters are muddied. Can Erzsike exonerate herself? Should she?
Set during a secular Jewish family’s first-ever Passover seder, Seder is an intimate epic about how one Hungarian woman survived the 20th century, from the darkest days of Stalinism to the fall of the Soviet Union and beyond. Inspired by a true story. Part of the larger 7th project.
(4 M, 3W)
Development History
[2017] World Premiere at Hartford Stage (dir. Elizabeth Williamson)
[2016] Workshop, Hartford Stage (dir. Elizabeth Williamson)
[2012] Workshop, Sirály Arts Center, Budapest (dir. András Dömötör)
[2012] Semi-Finalist, O'Neill National Playwrights Conference
[2011] Staged Reading, Quarter6Quarter7 Festival, Budapest (dir. András Dömötör)
[2011] Staged Reading, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Omaha (dir. Benjamin Graber)
[2011] PlayLabs Selection, Great Plains Theater Conference 2011
[2010] Staged Reading, NYU Tisch Goldberg Theatre (dir. Oliver Butler)
[2017] Edgerton Foundation New Play Award
[2017] Hartford Courant Best Production of a Play, 2017
[[2017] Finalist, Sky Cooper New American Play Prize
[2017] Finalist, Premiere Stages' Play Festival (dir. John Wooten)
[2017] National Jewish Playwriting Contest, Top 10
[2016] Semi-Finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize
[2016] Honorable Mention, The Kilroys' List
[2015] Honorable Mention, The Kilroys' List
[2010] Finalist, Six Points Fellowship 2010
Klauzál Square
Klauzál Square tells the story of Klara, a precocious preteen new to Budapest’s seedy 7th District. Ostracized and humiliated by the neighborhood mean girls, she starts hanging out with a strange companion: the ghost of a thirteen year old girl. With the ghost’s help, Klara strikes back at her tormenters and takes over their group. But over time, the girls’ adolescent power trips and mind games morph into something much older and darker. Inspired by a real Budapest playground built on what was once a Nazi mass grave. Part of the larger 7th project.
(5W)
Development History
[2018] Included on Steppenwolf's The Mix list
[2012] OPEN New Jewish Theater Residency via the Jewish Plays Project (dir. Jen Wineman)
[2012] Staged Reading in the 2012 Quarter6Quarter7 Festival, Budapest, Hungary (dir. Eszter Kalman)
[2014] Honorable Mention, The Kilroys' List
[2013] Semi-finalist, P73 Fellowship
[2012] Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival
The Wind and The Rain: a story about Sunny's Bar
(formerly Untitled Sunny's / Red Hook Project)
Site-specific immersive theatrical epic
Commissioned by En Garde Arts and The Vineyard Theatre
directed by and developed with Jared Mezzocchi
At the end of Conover Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on the waterfront, there is a bar called Sunny’s. For over one hundred years, it’s been run by one family, through booms and busts, prohibition and pandemics, blight and gentrification. It’s been home to dreamers and immigrants, artists, bootleggers, longshoremen, union bosses, corrupt police, numbers runners, bluegrass musicians, and hipsters. And to Tone Johansen, who fought to save it after Hurricane Sandy, against incredible odds.
Created by Obie Award winners Sarah Gancher (playwright) and Jared Mezzocchi (director), and commissioned by Vineyard Theatre and En Garde Arts, The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny’s Bar uses immersive design technology to bridge the past and present of Red Hook. Beginning at the Waterfront Museum barge and ending at Sunny’s Bar, this site-specific theatrical experience invites audiences to situate themselves within the history of a neighborhood, a family, a storied gathering place, and the currents of time and nature that have shaped it all.
(2W, 2M)
Development History
[2024] Premiere, co-production between Vineyard Theatre and En Garde Arts
at the Red Hook Waterfront Museum
[2024] Vineyard 2-Week Workshop
[2024] Dorset Theatre Festival Residency
[2024] Hermitage Artist Retreat Residency
[2024] Vineyard 3-Day Workshop
[2023] Residency at Andy's Summer Playhouse
[2023] Workshop with En Garde Arts
[2022] Residency at Bethany Arts
[2022] En Garde/Vineyard Residency in Red Hook
[2022] Stillwrights Retreat
[2023] NYSCA Fellowship
[2023] Venturous Foundation Finishing Commission
Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical
a bluegrass adaptation of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin
(and Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin)
Book, original music, and lyrics by Sarah Gancher
Commissioned by Dorset Theatre Festival
A bluegrass musical based on Eugene Onegin (both Pushkin’s novel-in-verse and Tchaikovsky’s opera.) In the late 40s, touring bluegrass musician Eugene finds himself stranded in his bandmate Lensky’s Arkansas hometown. There, he’s drawn to Tanya, a gifted young songwriter filled with romantic notions. Her declaration of love to Eugene turns a church hall dance into a drunken row that ends in murder and sets the characters spinning off into wildly different futures. Set in the simple world of post-war Arkansas and the tight-knit Grand Ole Opry community in 60s Nashville, Eugene Onegin explores what it is to build identities, dreams and communities through music. It’s structured as a jam session, where singer-musicians sit in a simple circle of chairs to tell their tale, with seats left open for audience members who might want to sit in.
(2W, 2M and bluegrass jam)
Development History
[2024] Workshop and showings at Dorset Theatre Festival
[2024] Workshop and showings at the Arkansas New Play Festival (with dramaturg Ken Cerniglia)
[2023] Workshop and public showings at The Orchard Project (dir. Jade King Carroll and Dina Vovsi)
[2023] Demo Cutting
[2023] Creativity Fund Workshop at New Dramatists (dir. Jade King Carroll)
[2022] Private Work-in-Progress Showing at Dorset Theatre Festival (dir. Jade King Carroll)
[2021] Commissioned by Dorset Theatre Festival
[2024] Finalist for Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre
Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy
At the infamous (real-life!) Internet Research Agency, professional internet trolls work 24-7 to influence American popular opinion, creating the illusion of consensus—or conflict. There are floors for twitter, for facebook, memes, fake news, and comments sections.
RUSSIAN TROLL FARM imagines the daily lives of these workers as they invent characters, stage conflicts, and create conspiracies. What happens to your grasp on the truth when your whole job is lying? How does your identity shift when you impersonate Americans for a living? Does anybody want Thai food? From Thai Palace or Thai Pavillion?
(2W, 3M)
Development History
[2024] Full in-Person Off-Broadway Production at NYC's Vineyard Theatre, in association with Dori Berinstein (dir. Darko Tresnjak)
[2023] Full In-Person Production at Geva Theatre (dir. Darko Tresnjak)
[2022] Full In-Person Production at Forward Theatre (dir. Jennifer Uphoff Gray)
[2020] Full Online Production at Theaterworks Hartford/Theater Squared/The Civilians (dir. Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson)
[2020] Online Workshop at TheaterSquared (dir. Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson)
[2019] Workshop and Reading at New Dramatists via the Play Time program (dir. Kip Fagan)
[2019] Workshop with New Dramatists (dir. Rachel Chavkin)
[2023] OBIE Award Special Citation
[2020] NY Times Best Theater of 2020 list
[2020] NY Times Critics' Pick
In development with Pine Tree Entertainment
Hundred Days
The Lucky Ones
Mission Drift
I'll Get You Back Again
A bittersweet comedy with music set in Berkeley. Struggling stand-up comedian Chloe is sitting in for her dead father as the bassist for his seminal psychedelic rock band. As rehearsals progress, Chloe finds herself navigating increasingly delicate emotional terrain as old conflicts flare up and old flirtations reignite.
By turns comic and tragic, scathing and tender, the play is a meditation on what we inherit from the sixties; the joys and frustrations of collaboration; and the search for transcendence in art and comedy.
(4 M, 2 W)
Development History
[2017] World Premiere at Round House Theatre (dir. Rachel Chavkin)
[2016] Workshop and Staged Reading at Seattle Rep's The Other Season (dir. Rachel Chavkin)
[2015] Workshop and Staged Reading at Steppenwolf's First Look Festival (dir, Rachel Chavkin)
[2014] Roundtable reading at The Lark (dir. Portia Krieger)
[2013] Workshop and Staged Reading, Ars Nova Out Loud series (dir. Rachel Chavkin)
[2016] Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival
[2016] Honorable Mention, the Kilroys' List
[2015] Wait List for The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep
[2015] Honorable Mention, The Kilroys' List
[2013] Finalist, Playwrights' Week at The Lark
[2013] Nominee, Playwrights of New York Fellowship
The Place We Built
In a deserted neighborhood in post-communist Budapest, young bohemians squat in an abandoned building and build a bar. Reclaiming the Jewish identity their parents' generation abandoned after the Holocaust, they create a vibrant new subculture that combines big ideas and intense debates with wild parties. Friendships form and fray, couples recombine, people change, the neighborhood is transformed. But when authoritarianism and antisemitism make a surprise comeback in the country at large, will the place they built survive? Part of the larger 7th project.
A tale of friendship, idealism, and coming of age, set against the backdrop of Hungary's current terrifying slide into dictatorship—and the global rise of right-wing populism.
(7W, 4M)
Development History
[2019] Newly updated draft read at New York Theater Workshop (dir. Danya Taymor)
[2016] World Premiere at the Flea Theatre Mainstage (dir. Danya Taymor)
[2015] Staged Reading in the Women's Voices Theater Festival with Mosaic Theatre of DC (dir. Eleanor Holdridge)
[2015] Workshop and Staged Reading with OPEN Festival, Jewish Plays Project (dir, Benjamin Kamine)
[2015] Workshop and Staged Reading with The Playwrights' Realm (dir. Benjamin Kamine) (Writing Fellows selection)
[2013] Workshop production at NYU’s Lee Strasberg Institute (dir. Portia Krieger)
[2018] Top 10, Jewish Play Project's Best of the First 10 Years
[2016] Winner, AR Gurney Prize
[2016] Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival
[2015] Top 10 for Jewish Playwriting Contest
[2015] Honorable Mention, the Kilroys' List
[2013] Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission.
Seder
Twenty-first century Budapest. The old headquarters of the Hungarian KGB has reopened as a museum dedicated to Communist atrocities. Retired typist Erzsike is eager to visit her old work place. That is, until she comes face to face with her own photograph on the museum’s Wall of Murderers—and learns her estranged daughter put it there. As Erzsike and her family wrestle with their history, deep secrets are revealed, big questions are raised, and the moral and political waters are muddied. Can Erzsike exonerate herself? Should she?
Set during a secular Jewish family’s first-ever Passover seder, Seder is an intimate epic about how one Hungarian woman survived the 20th century, from the darkest days of Stalinism to the fall of the Soviet Union and beyond. Inspired by a true story. Part of the larger 7th project.
(4 M, 3W)
Development History
[2017] World Premiere at Hartford Stage (dir. Elizabeth Williamson)
[2016] Workshop, Hartford Stage (dir. Elizabeth Williamson)
[2012] Workshop, Sirály Arts Center, Budapest (dir. András Dömötör)
[2012] Semi-Finalist, O'Neill National Playwrights Conference
[2011] Staged Reading, Quarter6Quarter7 Festival, Budapest (dir. András Dömötör)
[2011] Staged Reading, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Omaha (dir. Benjamin Graber)
[2011] PlayLabs Selection, Great Plains Theater Conference 2011
[2010] Staged Reading, NYU Tisch Goldberg Theatre (dir. Oliver Butler)
[2017] Edgerton Foundation New Play Award
[2017] Hartford Courant Best Production of a Play, 2017
[[2017] Finalist, Sky Cooper New American Play Prize
[2017] Finalist, Premiere Stages' Play Festival (dir. John Wooten)
[2017] National Jewish Playwriting Contest, Top 10
[2016] Semi-Finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize
[2016] Honorable Mention, The Kilroys' List
[2015] Honorable Mention, The Kilroys' List
[2010] Finalist, Six Points Fellowship 2010
Klauzál Square
Klauzál Square tells the story of Klara, a precocious preteen new to Budapest’s seedy 7th District. Ostracized and humiliated by the neighborhood mean girls, she starts hanging out with a strange companion: the ghost of a thirteen year old girl. With the ghost’s help, Klara strikes back at her tormenters and takes over their group. But over time, the girls’ adolescent power trips and mind games morph into something much older and darker. Inspired by a real Budapest playground built on what was once a Nazi mass grave. Part of the larger 7th project.
(5W)
Development History
[2018] Included on Steppenwolf's The Mix list
[2012] OPEN New Jewish Theater Residency via the Jewish Plays Project (dir. Jen Wineman)
[2012] Staged Reading in the 2012 Quarter6Quarter7 Festival, Budapest, Hungary (dir. Eszter Kalman)
[2014] Honorable Mention, The Kilroys' List
[2013] Semi-finalist, P73 Fellowship
[2012] Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival