Long Wharf Theatre Announces Season 62: State of the Union

Long Wharf Theatre Announces 62nd Season

The award-winning New Haven theatre company announces “State of the Union,” a season dedicated to stories that speak to our time.

Venues and partners include Legacy Theatre, Waterwell Theatre, The Theater Offensive, Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Yale Schwarzman Center, Quinnipiac University, and Southern Connecticut State University.

New Haven, CT (July 17, 2026) – Long Wharf Theatre today announces its 2026/2027 season, with the theme State of the Union, the company’s “response to the moment.” Meredith Suttles (Managing Director) and Jacob G. Padrón (Creative Producer and former Artistic Director) also announce that Padrón will direct a show within the season’s lineup while supporting the transition to a new Artistic Director. The 62nd season is the theatre’s fourth under its innovative producing model of presenting works across Greater New Haven and beyond to strengthen civic bonds across the region, sharing a mission of producing boundary-breaking theatre with and for its many kaleidoscopic communities.

The season comes on the heels of its hugely successful 2025/2026 season, which included sold-out runs of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean and English as well as an off-Broadway co-production of Torera. The critically acclaimed productions and diverse partner programming welcomed audiences into venues across New Haven, as well as a theatre in New York City. Programming also included free monthly curator-led tours and special public events at the New Haven Museum exhibition Invitation to Engage: 60 Years of Long Wharf Theatre & Beyond–now extended through Labor Day–as well as the season-long, citywide, multi-event August Wilson Celebration.

The 2026 recipient of the Elm City Freddy Fixer, Inc. Arts & Culture Award, former Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón says of his time at Long Wharf Theatre and the season’s theme, “In our country’s 250th year, we asked ourselves how our theatre is responding to the moment while fulfilling our mission of bringing theatre to the people. The response is in our theme and selection of work: State of the Union speaks to the condition of our communities, our dialogue, and our ability to illuminate our humanity through creative expression. From the Artistic Congress, where the collective community imagines and speaks up together, to Black Trans Women at the Center, a continued tradition of centering  Black trans artists telling their own stories –  this season is deeply rooted in the power of the American theatre.

Coming off of her inaugural season with the company, Long Wharf Theatre’s Managing Director Meredith Suttles shares this vision for the future and the power of the company’s continued evolution: "Shaping this season alongside Jacob has been a privilege, particularly as we celebrate his extraordinary artistic leadership while laying the foundation for Long Wharf Theatre's next chapter. State of the Union reflects our belief that theatre has the power to bring people together, spark meaningful conversation, and deepen our understanding of one another. I'm excited to build on the momentum we've created and welcome new artistic leadership as we continue ensuring Long Wharf Theatre creates the space where artists, audiences, and communities can imagine what's possible together."

The season lineup for Long Wharf Theatre’s 62nd season, 2026-2027 to date includes:

ARTISTIC CONGRESS
With support from Yale Schwarzman Center

The Artistic Congress returns to launch season 62 as a dynamic, citywide initiative at the heart of Long Wharf Theatre’s State of the Union” — a call to examine the realities of this political moment and imagine a better future together. Bringing together artists, organizers, and community members across New Haven, the series positions creativity as a civic force, one that helps us make sense of where we are and actively shape where we are going. This season-long series will launch on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, at Yale Schwarzman Center. Additional venues and dates throughout the season to be announced.

THE FORD/HILL PROJECT
In Collaboration with Waterwell
Created by Elizabeth Marvel and Lee Sunday Evans, who also directs
In Partnership with Quinnipiac University

Performance Location: Quinnipiac University and Southern Connecticut State University 
Dates: September 19-27, 2026

The Ford/Hill Project brings the words of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford to the stage, placing their Senate testimonies in direct conversation with each other. Drawn from verbatim transcripts, the piece reveals how two women, decades apart, confronted power and systemic oppression in real time, and how their credibility, voices, and lived experiences were scrutinized, questioned, and shaped by race and gender.

Arthur Miller’s THE PRICE
Directed by Ralph B. Peña
In Partnership with Legacy Theatre

Performance Location: Legacy Theatre in Branford, CT. 
Dates: November 5-22, 2026

Written in 1967 as a response to America’s moral debt for the Vietnam War, Arthur Miller’s The Price is an achingly intimate exploration of two estranged brothers reuniting years after their father’s death demands a reckoning with the question: what price do we pay in the present for the choices we made in the past? In a bold reimagining of the play that responds to our own fraught times, renowned director Ralph B. Peña returns to Long Wharf Theatre (The Chinese Lady, 2022) and invites audiences to experience this universal story from the perspective of an Asian American family.

72 MILES TO GO… 
By Hilary Bettis
Directed by Jacob G. Padrón 
In Partnership with Southern Connecticut State University

Performance Location: Kendall Drama Lab at Southern Connecticut State University
Dates: February 11-28, 2027

72 Miles to Go… traces one family’s journey across time, borders, and their ongoing search for freedom. Clinging to the promise of their destinies and empowered by a love that knows no borders, Billy and Anita brave every challenge with hearts wide open to create a future of safety and hope for their children. The story takes place in Tucson, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico, and this production from director Jacob G. Padrón celebrates the courage, power, dignity, and beauty of all the immigrant communities, including in New Haven and beyond.

BLACK TRANS WOMEN AT THE CENTER
Co-Produced with The Theater Offensive 
Curated and Associate Produced by Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi
This production will be available online.

In the 26-27 season, Long Wharf Theatre and The Theater Offensive will co-produce the 7th annual Black Trans Women at the Center new play festival. Led by Curator/Associate Producer Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, the festival offers powerful glimpses into the lived experiences of the Black trans community. We celebrate creative works that challenge oppression, honor trans lives, illuminate histories, and envision transformative futures.

PASS THE MIC
A Long Wharf Theatre Performance Series
Multiple venues and dates to be announced throughout the season.

A series of dynamic cabarets featuring New Haven’s own world-class artists, bringing rich entertainment to the forefront of New Haven’s creative expression. Multiple evenings of celebration, wonder, and jaw-dropping performances that put the artist in the spotlight and center New Haven on the map.

Long Wharf Theatre continues its commitment to producing boundary-breaking theatre for and with the people of the City of New Haven and beyond. Based on its three core pillars of artistic innovation, radical inclusion, and kaleidoscopic partnerships, the season showcases productions and events throughout the region, featuring a collection of diverse storytellers. Dedicated to bringing theatre to the people, Long Wharf Theatre’s 62nd season of new work and a re-imagined classic will engage audiences from first-time theatergoers to longtime supporters. Long Wharf Theatre believes theatre belongs to everyone.

Long Wharf Theatre’s seasons characteristically thrive on bold collaborations with artistic partners: “Resurrecting text from our history can create a visceral experience that illuminates our present,” shares Lee Sunday Evans, director and co-creator of The Ford/Hill Project, “we look forward to bringing this piece to Long Wharf Theatre’s season as an opportunity to invite audiences to re-engage with transcripts from Senate confirmation hearings when two regular people chose to tell their story and ask our government about the law, its impact, and power. We made this to spark multi-generational conversation about raw topics that affect us all - looking back to point us toward the future we can keep fighting for.”

Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Curator and Associate Producer of Black Trans Women at the Center, says, “I am so thrilled for Year 7 of Black Trans Women At The Center and deepening Long Wharf’s relationship with The Theater Offensive (Artistically Directed by my history-making sister Giselle Byrd). Year 7 will be thrilling as we continue to expand this boundary-breaking program by producing a short film! In the spirit of collaboration, community, and co-creation, Year 7’s cohort will work together to bring a new script to the screen, holding a mirror to the times, reflecting on our past, and offering a possibility of how to move this world of ours into the future, because a liberated world is possible but not without Black Trans People.”

Director of Arthur Miller’s The Price, Ralph B. Peña, shares, “I’m very happy to return to Long Wharf Theatre after The Chinese Lady. Arthur Miller’s The Price is a play I’ve had on my bucket list for a long time. The story of two brothers confronting old wounds, family obligations, and the cost of the choices they made feels immediately contemporary and deeply relevant today. I’m excited to bring a fresh perspective to this American classic and share it with Long Wharf audiences.”

Season passes can be purchased online at LongWharf.org or by calling the box office at 203-693-1486.

72 MILES TO GO... is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc. | www.concordtheatricals.com

THE PRICE is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of
Dramatists Play Service. www.concordtheatricals.com

ABOUT LONG WHARF THEATRE
Founded during the peak of America’s regional theatre movement, Long Wharf Theatre opened on July 4, 1965 with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Under the leadership of Managing Director Meredith Suttles, our company continues to build on a legacy of more than 400 productions that represent the best of classic plays, beloved musicals, and boundary-breaking new work, including plays by Matt Barbot, Julia Cho, Anna Deavere Smith, Ricardo Pérez González, Dominique Morisseau, Dael Orlandersmith, Eliana Pipes, Tracey Scott Wilson, Lloyd Suh, and Paula Vogel.

We are internationally recognized for a commitment to commissioning, developing, and producing new plays that expand the canon of the American theatre. More than 30 Long Wharf Theatre productions have transferred to Broadway and Off-Broadway, and we produced three winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama: D.L. Coburn’s The Gin Game, Michael Cristofer’s The Shadow Box, and Margaret Edson’s Wit. Today, Long Wharf Theatre continues to capture the imagination of our audiences as it activates the City of New Haven and beyond as its stage. Beginning in 2023, our communities experienced Long Wharf Theatre productions in 30 unique venues across performing arts centers, music halls, community spaces, civic buildings, libraries, schools, museums, and homes in Branford, Cheshire, Hamden, Madison, Milford, Woodbridge, and eight New Haven neighborhoods, including our 2024 award-winning production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at Canal Dock Boathouse.

Building upon our core pillars of artistic innovation, radical inclusion, and kaleidoscopic partnerships, Long Wharf Theatre is living into its promise of Theatre for Everyone by offering free student matinees, free tickets to all students grades K-12, discounted tickets for college students, an internship program with SCSU, pay-what-you-wish previews, and free public programming throughout the year. In recognition of its artistic achievements, Long Wharf Theatre won a Regional Theatre Tony Award, the Margo Jones Award, and its productions have received multiple Tony, Obie, and Connecticut Critics Circle awards and nominations in nearly every category. Our efforts have garnered extensive feature stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Theatre Magazine, and PBS NewsHour.

In 2023, former Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón was named Person of the Year by the National Theatre Conference, joining the ranks of former recipients August Wilson, Lloyd Richards, and Joseph Papp for leading with courage and creating possibility for Long Wharf Theatre.

ABOUT WATERWELL
Waterwell (Lee Sunday Evans, Artistic Director; Sarah Scafidi, Managing Director; Arian Moayed, co-founder and Board Chair) is an Obie Award–winning production company that creates theater, film, and digital media that wrestles with complex civic questions, gathering people for cultural events that provoke, inspire, and build community.

The company is dedicated to telling engrossing stories that can reach people across real and perceived divides. Waterwell produces its projects using an evolving set of best practices that are influenced by the principles of community organizing and movement building. This is part of an ongoing investigation into how storytelling can have the most relevance and impact in efforts to create a more just and humane society. Waterwell’s projects manifest in more than one medium but everything the company does is infused with its love of the immediacy of live performance.

Waterwell's most recent production The Ford/Hill Project is an excavation of the testimonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, in collaboration with Elizabeth Marvel. Since 2024, over 2,500 people have attended performances at Woolly Mammoth Theater, The Public Theater, and La MaMa, with nightly public conversations by experts and thought leaders. In collaboration with Nimruz, Waterwell brought the Iranian play Blind Runner to St. Ann’s Warehouse in January 2025, alongside the Unseen Iran cultural festival featuring music, puppetry, films and more for thousands of New Yorkers. In 2023, Waterwell produced the critically acclaimed world-premiere of Lameece Issaq’s A Good Day to Me Not to You at The Connelly Theater in partnership with Plate Spinner Productions. Arena Stage remounted the production in Spring 2026.

The company has produced a number of projects about various aspects of immigration, including a storytelling event at Symphony Space, Stories from the City of Immigrants, for a 900-person audience which was recorded for national broadcast on public radio; Refugees + Resettlement in the United States, a commission from the Council on Foreign Relations; Do Not Tell Them I Am a Prince, a real-life story about immigration detention, created in partnership with the Dignity Not Detention Coalition; Se Lo Que Es Pandemia/I Know What Pandemic Means, a short documentary about the experience of undocumented workers in Corona, Queens during the height of Covid-19, produced in collaboration with the news outlet Documented; The Flores Exhibits, a video series of artists, lawyers, advocates, and immigrants reading sworn testimonies of children held in detention facilities at the U.S. / Mexico border; and The Courtroom: a reenactment of one woman's deportation proceedings, which featured a script taken verbatim from transcripts, was performed in real courtrooms around NYC and then adapted into a feature-length film that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. www.waterwell.org

ABOUT LADY DANE FIGUEROA EDIDI
Dubbed the Ancient Jazz Priestess of Mother Africa, Lady Dane is a Black Nigerian, Cuban, Indigenous, American Performance Artist, Author, Poet, Educator, Cultural Worker, Producer, Film Maker, Dramaturg, a Helen Hayes Award winning Playwright (Klytmnestra: An Epic Slam Poem), a 2021 Helen Merrill Award Winner, a 3x Helen Hayes Award nominated choreographer, and a Princess Grace Honoraria Award winner. She is the co-founder and Co-director of the Black Trans Prayer Book, whose award-winning short film, A New Creation Story, is making the festival rounds.  

She is the curator and associate producer of Black Trans Women At The Center and is a Long Wharf Theatre Artistic Ensemble Member as well.

ABOUT THE THEATER OFFENSIVE
Founded in 1989 during the height of the AIDS crisis, The Theater Offensive (TTO) is a Tony Award-nominated organization that presents liberating art by, for, and about Queer and Trans people of Color (QTBIPOC) in Boston and beyond. What began as an act of protest and cultural resistance has evolved into one of the nation’s leading Queer cultural institutions, grounded in radical kinship, artistic innovation, and community care. TTO is more than a theater company. It is a cultural institution, a living think tank, a spiritual studio, and a performance lab guided by and built for QTBIPOC communities. For more than three decades, the organization has created space for artists and audiences to gather, imagine, heal, and challenge dominant narratives through bold, socially resonant performance and cultural programming. Born from a moment of profound grief, urgency, and defiance, TTO has always understood art as a tool for survival and transformation. Its work is rooted in the belief that theater can do more than entertain. Theater can preserve memory, build connection, provoke dialogue, and help shape more just futures. TTO does not create work for tolerance alone. It creates work for liberation. Grounded in Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer, and Trans histories, TTO champions artistic experimentation, radical imagination, and culturally rooted storytelling that centers QTBIPOC voices and experiences. Across its work, the organization prioritizes joy, complexity, and collective transformation, while creating spaces where communities can feel fully seen, affirmed, and supported. Community is central to TTO’s mission and impact. The organization transforms stages into sanctuaries and performance into a practice of collective care. Through artistic programming, partnerships, public events, and cultural organizing, TTO fosters intergenerational exchange and deep community engagement throughout Boston and beyond. Its work exists at the intersection of art, advocacy, and social change, continually expanding what a theater institution can be and whom it can serve. TTO also plays a vital role in supporting artists and strengthening the broader cultural ecosystem. By investing in emerging voices, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community-centered creative practices, the organization helps cultivate new generations of artists, organizers, and cultural leaders. Its programming reflects the layered realities and intersectional experiences of QTBIPOC communities, honoring the fullness of race, gender, sexuality, disability, immigration, and class within contemporary Queer life. Today, TTO continues to build toward its vision of becoming a permanent cultural hub for Queer futures in Boston and beyond. The organization remains committed to creating work that challenges, heals, and imagines new possibilities for collective liberation. At its core, TTO believes art is not simply entertainment. It is memory, medicine, worldbuilding, and wholeness. TTO exists as both a challenge and a call: to the field, to community, to history, and to everything coming next.

ABOUT SOUTHERN CONNECTICUT STATE UNIVERSITY THEATRE DEPARTMENT
At Southern Connecticut State University, the Department of Theatre provides comprehensive, experiential training across all facets of the theatrical craft. Our mission is to nurture each student’s personal, creative, and professional growth through rigorous study, collaborative practice, and a commitment to learning by doing. Through this balance of artistry, technique, and production experience, students develop the skills and perspective needed to enter the field as imaginative, disciplined, and socially engaged theatre-makers.

ABOUT THE LEGACY THEATRE
The Legacy Theatre is located in the Stony Creek Village of Branford, CT, steps from the Long Island Sound. Legacy is a fully accessible, non-profit, professional theatre and training center along the Connecticut shoreline. The theatre, fully renovated prior to its opening in 2021, is housed in the former Stony Creek Puppet Theatre, a building with more than a century of rich history that includes performances by Orson Welles, and in 2024, a musical directed by Julie Andrews.