A celebration of new works for the american stage

JUNE 2024

Join us this summer for a series of trail-blazing new plays and help shape new works from the ground up. In addition to sitting in for the performances, you’re also invited to watch intimate conversations between the playwrights, directors, and cast and share your own thoughts with the author and creative team—and help shape new works from the ground up.

Performances will be held at TheatreSquared, at Ovations+ (formerly Trike Theatre) in Bentonville, and at the Medium in Springdale.

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New Play Passes grant entry to all events. Seating is very limited.

2024 Lineup

Eugene Onegin
music, book, & lyrics by Sarah Gancher

Saturday, June 15 at 5pm (at Ovations+)
Saturday, June 22 at 5pm (at TheatreSquared)

Eugene Onegin by Sarah Gancher (creator of the Obie Award-winning Russian Troll Farm) is a modern bluegrass musical that is half pickin' party and half barbeque. Pushkin's novel-in-verse and Tchaikovsky's opera have been reset and given new life in 1940s rural Arkansas, when a girl who dreams of writing songs falls for a magnetic but jaded touring musician.

Have to Believe We Are Magic
by Sara Guerrero

Friday, June 14 at 7pm (at The Medium)
Sunday, June 23 at 2pm (at TheatreSquared)

What is magic? Are we magic? And if so, how do we hold it? In this part-biographical-part-magic love letter to a Pocha-Chicana-Latina coming-of-age time of roller-skating, family, friendships, sex, love, abortion, and self-discoveries, how does one keep and find their magic? All unfolds under the shadow of "The Magic Kingdom" (or “The Tragic Kingdom”) in central Orange County, California, in the summer of 1994.

Edi Ya & Diamond’s grove
by a.k. payne

Saturday, June 15 at 2pm (at Ovations+)
Saturday, June 22 at 2:30pm (at TheatreSquared)

Set at the edge of an old U.S. mill town, Edi Ya & Diamon’s Grove tells a story about two Black young people working in an amusement park dripping with ghosts. Since the late 19th century, this land has roared with cheap thrills and attractions—statues of calcified cowboys, laffin ladies, infinite swimming pools, dance halls, and wooden coasters. Since the 19th century, when their people arrived from the South, this amusement park has been contested for Black peoples of this city, and Edi Ya and Diamond have known of it out of the womb. These two who are becoming in this strange smoky city—knowing stories of the pool and dance hall their grandparents could not enter, knowing of long summers spent riding coasters and losing childhood— try to make sense of grief in this place of lost dreams.

Malcolm X and Redd Foxx Washing Dishes at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in Harlem
by Jonathan Norton

Sunday, June 16 at 2pm (at The Medium)
Sunday, June 23 at 5pm (at TheatreSquared)

1943. Two young Harlemites—Little and Foxy—form a friendship over leftover fried chicken and dirty dishwater. But a long, hot summer of heartbreak, betrayal, and racial uprisings moves them closer to the men they will become and farther from each other. Commissioned by TheatreSquared.

Holy Waters
by THE LATINX THEATRE PROJECT

Friday, June 23 at 7pm (at TheatreSquared)

The newest devised work by Northwest Arkansas’s trailblazing LatinX Theatre Project (LXTP). LXTP is a socially engaged theatre group of professionals and young artists-in-training that is committed to continuing an inclusive conversation about community identity through its devised theatre performances. The content of LXTP’s work not only includes original dialogue, movement, music, poetry, and rap; but also brings a focus to the authentic representation of Latinx voices in the arts and community.