NEW YORK CITY: Soho Rep has announced The Hunger Cycle, a group of three ambitious world premiere productions over the next three seasons prompted by the question: “What are we hungry for?” While each work is distinctive aesthetically, topically, and formally, they explore material, emotional, and moral forms of hunger sustenance in contemporary life. The plays are The Potluck by César Alvarez, Feast for the Dead by Madeline Easley, and Hunger by the collective Radical Evolution.
“Soho Rep has long been driven by the ambitions of its artists,” said Soho Rep director Eric Ting in a statement. “Those ambitions have frequently led our artists into direct confrontation with the complex systems that govern our society. The artists represented by the Hunger Cycle—César, Maddie, Radical Evolution—are quintessential models of this, each unwilling to compromise their interrogation of our times. The scale, scope, and subjects of their visions thrill us.”
All three shows are ambitious in terms of artistic scope, cast size, design challenges, special effects, and more, and are among the most large-scale works in the company’s 50-year history. Soho Rep received support from Civis Foundation for the project, with additional support from Miranda Family Fund for The Potluck. Feast for the Dead received a Venturous Playwright Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, supported by Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation.
“It is equally thrilling when such work leads us into orbit with extraordinary supporters like the Civis Foundation,” Soho Rep director Caleb Hammons said in a statement. “Our two organizations share the fundamental belief that pioneering works of art need pioneering support. In a moment when our industry is constricting, their visionary, signaling partnership is enabling us to think more expansively.”
The Hunger Cycle will begin in the summer with the world premiere of The Potluck by César Alvarez, directed by Sarah Benson, co-produced with INTAR Theatre. A new musical about the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which five labor organizers were murdered at a protest in North Carolina by the KKK and the American Nazi Party, The Potluck features a 12-person intergenerational cast to conjure the softer side of the revolution, while telling a story about what to do when the government is actually trying to kill you. Alvarez themself was born into the survivor community and named for two of the victims.
“It’s extremely complex to produce a new musical, and even harder to produce one about healing from state-sanctioned murder,” Alvarez said in a statement. “The story of the Greensboro Massacre has been with me for my entire life, and over the last seven years I’ve been trying to transform it through the ritual togetherness of musical theatre. This production is the culmination of years of creative labor.”
As part of its 2026-27 season, Soho Rep will produce Madeline Easley’s Off-Broadway debut, Feast for the Dead, a nine-person play weaving a speculative future about our responsibility to the deceased, resilience in the living, and cycles of destruction and rebirth into the unexpected vessel of a zombie apocalypse. The play is described as having “a keen sense of pop culture, a vibrant flair for the theatrical, and a full beating heart.”
Easley is a New York-based Wyandotte writer from Kansas City, who continually returns to the circular connection between living beyond death and her tribal history by interrogating speculative manifestations of joy and grief that spill over centuries. Her tribe’s Feast of the Dead is their way of joining the physical world and the spiritual world, and experiencing grief in community.
“I hope that Feast for the Dead invites audiences to examine the cycle we currently find ourselves in: the cycle of violence, which touches every part of our life in this country,” Easley said in a statement. “My play responds to the fact that this cycle feeds upon itself. I dream that this production will provide a way of organizing ourselves to meet an uncertain future.”
Closing the cycle for the 2027-28 season, the devised theatre collective Radical Evolution’s Hunger will invite audiences into a fable that aims to challenge audiences to interrogate physical, spiritual, and communal hunger and how these feelings remind them to (re)connect with each other and the natural world as a means of healing ourselves and the planet.
“With this project, we dive deep into the meaning of hunger in all its forms, how it informs and is informed by the myths and fables we tell ourselves, and what it can look like for the many different versions of ourselves to seek satisfaction,” Hunger creators Anooj Bhandari, Jei Lawrence, Meropi Peponides, and Joya Powell said in a joint statement. “With a combination of experiments in sound and movement, and a deep appreciation for the stories nature tells us, we’re excited to bring this piece to life. Soho Rep has met our idiosyncratic, collective creation process with visionary support and care.”
