3 World Premieres and A 20th Anniversary Production Announced In The Miami New Drama 2022-2023 Season
Miami New Drama (Miami Beach, FL) is proud to announce a season of transformative, dynamic plays coming to the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach starting October 2022. The company’s sixth full season features three National Endowment for the Arts award-winning world premiere plays and the 20th anniversary of a Pulitzer Prize winning made-in-Miami play that all tell authentic Miami stories. The season presents a coming home story for both the artists and the subjects of the stories.
“This is an incredibly powerful season that is dedicated to Miami,” says Artistic Director, Michel Hausmann. “These groundbreaking works reflect on our past and shed light on our present, while looking to the future of one of the most diverse, complex, and exciting cities in America today.”
The season opens with the world premiere of ELIÁN, revisiting the Elián Gonzalez saga of 40 years ago, pulling back the curtain on this Miami Cuban-American story of immigration, humanity and politics. This new play is written by Rogelio Martinez (7 Deadly Sins, Born In East Berlin) and directed by Miami New Drama’s Artistic Director, Michel Hausmann.
After the New Year, Nilo Cruz’ Pulitzer Prize-winning, Anna in the Tropics, celebrates the 20th anniversary of its South Florida world premiere. A poetic story of love, longing and betrayal set in Florida at a Cuban-American cigar factory in 1929. This iconic play brought national attention to South Florida theater in 2002 and with Cruz at the helm to direct, this production will celebrate its impact on the American canon and its continued legacy as the first Latino-penned play to win the Pulitzer.
March 2023, introduces the company’s fourth world-premiere from Aurin Squire (Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy, CBS’s The Good Fight & Evil), TV writer and Opalocka-raised artist. Squire is a masterful storyteller that can spin any subject into a relevant, emotional, and enjoyable tale most recently with the Louis Armstrong musical, A Wonderful World. With Defacing Michael Jackson, Squire takes us back to the 80’s in a coming of age story, a time when pop-culture icons were otherworldly heros and a group of kids in Miami’s Opa-Locka are trying to figure out life in the midst of social and racial unrest.
The season comes to a close in the spring with the long-awaited Create Dangerously, a devised piece directed and written by Tony Nominee Lileana Blain-Cruz (The Skin of Our Teeth, Marys Seacole) based on the work of Haitian-American novelist, Edwidge Danticat. It is an exploratory journey through an immigrant artist’s mind; moving between memory and fiction, recollection and contemplation, joy and despair. This piece has been in development since winning the first ever Knight Foundation Knight New Works Challenge in 2017.
Season memberships are now on sale at www.miaminewdrama.org
Miami New Drama is a nonprofit professional theater company based in Miami Beach, Florida committed to artistic excellence and groundbreaking work, with a vision of theater as a powerful form of social engagement. In residence at the historic Colony Theatre on Miami Beach, the company focuses on the development of new plays and musicals in both English and Spanish, most notably 7 Deadly Sins, winner of the 2021 Drama League Award for Outstanding Interactive or Socially-Distanced Theater, the world premiere development of the new Louis Armstrong musical A Wonderful World, When Monica Met Hillary by Winter Miller, The Cuban Vote by Carmen Pelaez, the first ever multilingual adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town, The Cubans by Michael Leon, Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy by Billy Corben & Aurin Squire, Queen of Basel by Hilary Bettis, Viva La Parranda! by Betsayda Machado and La Parranda El Clavo in collaboration with Juan Souki, and Gente Ociosa by Karin Valecillos. Miami New Drama is the winner of two Knight Arts Challenge awards and a Knight New Works Miami award from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It was the 2018 and 2022 Miami New Times Best Theater for Drama.
Miami New Drama is made possible with the support of the City of Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, The State of Florida, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Knight Foundation.
