Long Wharf puts out lineup
New Haven theater’s season to include plays, virtual fest
New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre has announced its 202425 season. The 60th anniversary season will include three live in-person productions plus the return of an online short play festival and an “artistic congress.”
The company is continuing its transition to a new way of working. Two years ago, the Long Wharf Theatre, which had been based for 57 years in its own space among the loading docks on Sargent Drive, was changed by its Board of Directors into an itinerant theater company producing shows at a variety of different locations in and around New Haven.
The 2024-25 season includes “She Loves Me,” directed by Padrón, from Nov. 30 through Dec. 15 at The Lab at CONNCORPS in Hamden. The musical by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joe Masteroff is based on the same 1937 play “Parfumerie” that inspired the romantic films “The Little Shop Around the Corner” and “You’ve Got Mail.” Calling it a “holiday show,” the Long Wharf promises a “fresh interpretation” in an “intimate setting” where audiences will “feel like part of the story.”
“She Loves Me” marks the first full production that Padrón has directed for the Long Wharf Theatre. Padrón co-directed the current show at Theaterworks Hartford, the immigration drama “Sanctuary City.”
“El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom” by Matt Barbot, directed by Kinan Valdez, from Jan. 25, 2025, through Feb. 16, 2025, at Southern Connecticut State University’s Lyman Center. The Long Wharf Theatre will perform this play about a comic book artist who dresses up as the Puerto Rican superhero he’s created on a conventional stage at SCSU, whose theater department has an ongoing partnership with the theater company.
“Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Toward Destiny,” written and performed by Terrence Riggins and directed by Cheyenne Barboza, from May
15, 2025, to June 8, 2025, will be presented in collaboration with New Haven’s Collective Consciousness Theatre at Yale’s Off Broadway Theater. The one-person show was workshopped this year at the Bregamos Theater in New Haven.
The Long Wharf is also hosting an Artistic Congress on Oct. 25-27 at Yale University’s Schwarzman Center.
The event is described as a discussion about “why theater is essential to a thriving democracy” as well as a gathering space for “artists, scholars and neighbors” and a networking opportunity for those who work in theater.
The Long Wharf ’s annual virtual new play festival Black Trans Women at the Center will also return with the dates yet to be announced in November.
The 2023-24 Long Wharf season offered three full productions: An intimate staging of “The Year of Magical Thinking” staged in private homes and libraries, the Arthur Miller drama “A View from the Bridge” produced at the Canal Dock Boathouse overlooking the New Haven harbor and the upcoming “Amm(i)gone” created and performed by Adil Monsoor May 28 through June 23.
More details on the Long Wharf ’s 2024-25 season are at the theater’s website at longwharf.org.