In time of shifting resources and rising production costs, Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival remains a scrappy, joyful launchpad for theatrical innovators. With its rough-and-ready production process and its willingness to program unusual and unfinished work, this downtown stalwart continues to offer playwrights a rare kind of creative space, where a fast pace and chaotic energy are built on a bedrock of trust.
While Clubbed Thumb artistic director Maria Striar insisted, “I’ve never, ever, ever deliberately curated Summerworks for thematic unity,” the current crop of shows does seem to converge around similar concerns. “If I were a little bit younger, maybe I could say this without rolling my eyes at myself,” she continued. This year’s plays, she offered, are “all to some degree about the burden of operating within capitalism, about young people trying to figure out how to negotiate a system that is overpowering to them.”
From where I sit, that overlapping subject matter—and a shared interest in how capitalism affects family life—has given this year’s Summerworks a jolt of energy.
Make Me Laugh
Summerworks is the signature program of Clubbed Thumb, a small company founded in 1996 by Striar and Meg MacCary, who left her leadership position in 2009 to focus on her acting career. Every year, the festival presents three provocative new plays in back-to-back runs at the 89-seat Wild Project on New York City’s Lower East Side. The small space, short rehearsal schedules, and shorter runs enable Striar’s vision of Summerworks as a “high-ambition, low-stakes” playground for artists. Over the years, that approach has paid dividends for projects like Will Arbery’s Plano, which had an extended run at Summerworks, and Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, which originated at Summerworks.
Clubbed Thumb’s stated goal is to develop and produce “funny, strange, and provocative new plays.” This describes both the content that interests the company’s leaders and the reactions they hope to elicit. “It’s a pretty forgiving little mission,” Striar admitted, except for the first adjective: A new play, she said, “has to make me laugh.”
Along with producing director Michael Bulger, who’s held that role since 2013, Striar looks for plays with jagged edges and tries not to sand them down. As leaders, Striar and Bulger advocate for risk-taking over polish and camaraderie over institutional rigidity.
The formula works because Clubbed Thumb has remained small enough to be nimble. The staff is small, the runs are short, and the overhead costs are low (the company does not own a building, using office and rehearsal space at Playwrights Horizons year-round and renting the Wild Project for Summerworks). Striar said this is very intentional.
“The idea here is like bang, bang, bang,” she said. While production costs have doubled in the past few years, keeping the festival intimate is still important to her team—it’s what allows Clubbed Thumb to program works in progress, let artists play with new ideas, and build relationships with writers who see the company as an artistic family.
Warm Experimentalism
The first show this season, Milo Cramer’s Business Ideas (May 14-27), showcased the company’s penchant for building rich relationships with emerging artists. Cramer is an exciting young writer whose solo show School Pictures was produced last season at Playwrights Horizons. Last year, they completed an MFA program at UC San Diego and won the Kendeda Award, which funds a full production of a new play at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta for one MFA graduate every year. Cramer said they loved taking Business Ideas to the Alliance, but they also felt like “a lucky interloper”—an out-of-town artist who wasn’t fully integrated into the local theatre scene. That’s why they feel so grateful to bring the show to Summerworks, after earlier development in Clubbed Thumb’s Winterworks.
Business Ideas is a comedy about service work and get-rich-quick schemes set in a coffee shop. Like School Pictures, it consists of vignettes building toward grand ideas. The scenes alternate between a barista’s increasingly ridiculous customer service interactions and a mother-daughter team’s brainstorming sessions for a new business. In a little over an hour, tensions build to a boil and set off sweeping debates about inequality.
Cramer said the piece was inspired partly by their mother, who always dreamed of starting a business, and partly by their own history of service work. It’s also “deranged,” said Cramer. “There’s a lot of sublimated rage masked by warm comedy.”
Indeed, the show’s tone reflects Clubbed Thumb’s influence on Cramer’s work. After meeting Striar and Bulger through an internship at Playwrights Horizons, Cramer spent four years (2017-21) working for Clubbed Thumb as a part-time literary associate. Right away, they felt at home.
“I had also spent time in some downtown cool-kid spaces where things were cold,” said Cramer. “There was experimentalism at Clubbed Thumb, but it’s very warm—very friendly. If there’s an alienating distance, it’s with a charming wink instead of a reserved nod.”
Even after a full production, the show still benefited from being worked through in this setting. “Plays are like weird Lego sets,” Cramer says. “People put them together really differently,” and the team at Clubbed Thumb, they feel, understands how to make the pieces fit.
A Roller Coaster With Heart
Not Not Jane’s by Mara Nelson-Greenberg, now at the Wild Project through June 13, follows a young woman who earns a grant to open a community center but gets stuck running it from her mom’s house. When she started writing the play, Nelson-Greenberg said she was thinking about work-life balance and stretching herself too thin. Those ideas formed the seed of Not Not Jane’s, which the writer calls “a roller coaster with heart.”
Nelson-Greenberg came to Clubbed Thumb a decade ago as part of an Early Career Writers’ Group alongside Eboni Booth (Primary Trust) and Will Arbery (Heroes of the Fourth Turning). She recognizes how her project fits into this season.
“When I first heard the premise of Business Ideas,” she joked, “It was like, now they can’t build a coffee shop,” referring to her characters’ community project. She said she feels that hers and Cramer’s play rhyme but don’t repeat. “I feel like you can walk straight from Milo’s play into mine, and it’s like a different way into a very similar conversation,” she said.
That quote could also describe the two plays’ origins: Both are new projects by long-time Clubbed Thumb collaborators that took very different paths to the East Village. While Business Ideas has been in development for five years and comes to Summerworks after a full production out of town, Not Not Jane’s was commissioned six months ago and completed at warp speed. Striar said the show’s rapid development reminded her of another Clubbed Thumb project: Heidi Schreck’s widely produced What the Constitution Means to Me, which was part of Summerworks in 2017 before moving to New York Theatre Workshop and then Broadway (and then every theatre in the U.S., more or less). During rehearsals for Summerworks, Schreck tried out several endings for her play before landing on the speech-and-debate format that eventually stuck. Striar said she sees the opportunity for writers to test out ideas as a selling point for Summerworks.
Nelson-Greenberg agreed. “I’ve had the experience where I developed a play over so many years that I lost the initial bursts of inspiration,” she said. That doesn’t happen at Clubbed Thumb. “Maria and Michael have known my work for a long time,” Nelson-Greenberg continued. “They give me permission to follow the parts of my writing that I find most exciting but sometimes feel an impulse to fine-tune to the point where it becomes tamped down.”
Cross-Cultural Understanding
While Business Ideas and Not Not Jane’s are tight, contemporary comedies that deal with similar themes, Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice could not seem more different. It’s a play with music—the company’s first since Ethan Lipton’s Tumacho—and a period piece, set in a roller rink at the tail end of the Cold War. But Reddick’s play, which closes out Summerworks with a June 19-July 1 run, still resonates with the other two offerings.
Clubbed Thumb veteran and recent Tony nominee Knud Adams, who’s directing the show, acknowledged that “there’s a lot of pageantry around the periphery of Cold War Choir Practice: these great songs, these great movement pieces, this choir.” However, Adams said the show’s “heart” is the story of one Black family “trying to hold their business together and an only child’s feeling of responsibility to their single dad and their grandmother.”
In this way, the play overlaps with Cramer’s and Nelson-Greenberg’s comedic depictions of families struggling to make business dreams come true. Like Nelson-Greenberg, Reddick was inspired by her response to current events. She first imagined this project in response to the escalation of violence in Ukraine and the possibility of a second Cold War.
And like Cramer, Reddick drew on her own life experience. As a kid, she sang about “cross-cultural understanding” in a choir called Peace Child, she recalled. She’s combined those influences into a play centered on a more nationalist children’s choir that sees itself as part of the fight, and a 10-year-old girl named Meek who starts to question those ideas.
Reddick recently received her MFA in playwriting from Brown University, which partners with Clubbed Thumb to present readings of student work. (Striar and co-founder Meg MacCary both attended Brown as undergraduates.) Cold War Choir Practice was her thesis project, and Clubbed Thumb decided to pick it up for Summerworks in a co-production with Page 73. With the support of two companies, Reddick says “It’s kind of a dream first production.”
The show is surreal but deeply human. Its rich score, with tight harmonies and off-kilter holiday sounds, helped Striar and Adams recruit singers, including the actress and musical theatre writer Grace McLean, known for looping her own voice into intricate harmonies in works like In the Green (and for memorably playing Woodrow Wilson in Suffs), and the singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, who came up singing close harmony with her older sisters as one of The Roches. Those star performers—and Adams’s excitement to return to the Clubbed Thumb sandbox after his first Tony nod—reflect another aspect of the company: the way Striar and Bulger consistently get established artists to take a chance on exciting new work.
Move Fast and Build Things
For the leaders of Clubbed Thumb, speed is a feature, not a bug. The compressed timeline—three or four weeks of rehearsals, and just three days of tech rehearsal at the Wild Project—rewards instinct and creative risk. At times, this constraint can be frustrating. Adams, who often researches new projects for up to a year, admitted that working with Clubbed Thumb means making adjustments. “It’s about aiming true because you don’t have time to equivocate,” he said.
But if production times are short, Clubbed Thumb’s investment in artists is long. That’s certainly been true for Adams, whose first directing credit at Clubbed Thumb was 2016’s Every Angel Is Brutal by Julia Jarcho (now the head of the playwriting program at Brown). “Nine years ago, I was almost exclusively self-producing for two pennies,” he said. “A Clubbed Thumb gig was a career highlight, and I was like, ‘Wow, look at all these people here to support me,’ because I’d been a one-man band.”
Striar said she takes the company’s role in supporting new voices seriously. “Sometimes doing stuff with us is a sort of a first full-fledged experience,” she said. “You’re sort of establishing standards for what it means to work with other people, and hopefully they’re good ones, thoughtful ones, moral ones—they protect that artist.”
The company’s model also reflects current financial pressures on the theatre industry. Because it doesn’t have a mortgage to pay or producing commitments to fulfill, Clubbed Thumb survived through the pandemic without the losses that beset bigger companies, and is well-positioned to stay afloat even if NEA funding is pulled. (Clubbed Thumb was not among those who received a letter rescinding their NEA funding, and they have been reimbursed for last year’s grant spending.) Striar also acknowledged systemic issues: While Clubbed Thumb works to pay artists fairly for their work, these are short-term gigs and many of the artists they employ remain financially insecure.
Summerworks isn’t just launching new plays—it’s helping to preserve and evolve a downtown ecosystem that has powerfully shaped contemporary American theatre. As the industry recalibrates in the face of changing times, Clubbed Thumb’s greatest strength may be this modest proposal: Make room for mess, trust artists, and let them be weird.
Douglas Corzine is an arts and culture writer based in New York City but rooted in Nashville. He has written for Jacobin, TDF Stages, the Brooklyn Rail, and Theatrely.
