The Alcove
New Play Development Program
ALL NEW Conversations from the Alcove:
Reynaldo Piniella
ALL NEW Playwrights Salon:
Elaine Avila, Zizi Majid, and Zarina Shea
COMING SOON to the Digital Stage:
AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
By Hassan Abdulrazzak
Directed by Donnacadh O’Briain
Dramaturgs: Callan McCarthy and William Gregory
Sam, a young American diplomat on the rise, has one job: get the world’s richest man to sign. The hurricanes are coming, the clock is ticking, and Sheik Hammed, brilliant, unreadable, and utterly in control, has other ideas about what it will take to put pen to paper.
What begins as a routine negotiation in a Dubai conference room becomes a dangerous game of power, desire, and complicity, as two men circle each other across the widening gulf between empires in decline and empires on the rise. Sharp, seductive, and unflinching, American Nightmare asks how far we’ll go, and what we’ll become, when the cost of doing the right thing gets too high.
About the Program
The Alcove at the Lortel is a national and international multi-faceted approach to developing plays by early and mid-career playwrights and translators led and curated by Caridad Svich. The play development process starts with the awarding of commissions for full-length work. Additional elements include R & D work sessions in conjunction with dramaturgs, directors and/or designers, and rotating roster of artists-in-residence. Two digital components of the program are a digital reading series and a webcast series entitled “Conversations from the Alcove” where Svich chats with Lortel-commissioned artists about arts and ideas in theatre and performance. We also host in-house craft chats with eminent playwrights as a service to our commissioned and affiliated artists, led by Alistair McDowall, Roy Williams, Simon Stephens, J.T. Rogers, Tanika Gupta, and Jose Rivera thus far.
Playwrights and Theatre-makers are currently selected for Alcove commissions both by invitation and through agent submission and referrals on a rolling basis between September and February. An open submission window will be announced at a later date.
At the moment, the Lortel accepts full scripts for perusal from literary agents only or through industry referral. To be considered for the Alcove commissioning program, authors and agents may submit a one page proposal between February and April of every year.
Future components of the program will include a scratch night series, a works-in-progress festival and more. The Alcove is a place to seed dreams and innovative writing for performance reflective of the breadth and depth of artistry and perspectives in the national and global theatre realm.
Caridad Svich (Artistic Director of New Play Development) is a playwright, translator, screenwriter, and lyricist whose recognitions include a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement, a 2018 Ellen Stewart Career Achievement Award from ATHE, and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama. Her signature plays include 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart, Red Bike (NNPN Rolling World Premiere), Guapa (NNPN Rolling World Premiere), Spark (National Latino Playwriting Award), and The House of the Spirits(ATCA Primus Prize). Her play In the Time of the Butterflies is currently running at Repertorio Espanol in NYC. Her play Eva Luna (world premiere: 2022) receives regional premieres at Teatro Dallas (2026) and GALA Hispanic Theatre in Washington D.C. in 2027. She was also a co-screenwriter on feature film FUGITIVE DREAMS, streaming on Apple TV and more platforms.