Julia Weber
Staff Writer
While theaters across the globe are experiencing economic stress with rising production costs, it can be hard to support new work. However, Chautauqua Theater Company is increasing its focus on producing new work, which will continue this weekend with readings of the first New Play Workshop of the 2025 season, Pranayama, at 4 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday in Bratton Theater.
“I think it is a prime example of CTC investing in being a new work incubator and being an industry leader at a time when many, many, many beloved and vital new play programs are being slashed,” said CTC New Works Associate Lily Wolff.
Pranayama explores interpersonal relationships and connection through a group of students attending a 6 a.m. yoga class in Harlem in 2016. Playwright James Anthony Tyler has been in the throes of workshopping this new work alongside Wolff and CTC Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll to produce readings of the script as the first of three New Play Workshops being read this season.
For Carroll, CTC’s ability to serve as a home for new plays is a win-win situation for audiences and playwrights alike. The resources to foster work allow artists to find their artistic footing and situate their work within the theater canon, while audiences have plentiful opportunities to see the blossoming new works at their earliest stages.
“I think it’s something that the industry needs. I’m excited that we’re adding to the future canon of American theater,” Carroll said.
Carroll said she finds Pranayama to be a particularly fitting beginning to the 2025 theater season because it parallels the sense of community in Chautauqua so strongly.
“Everybody here chooses to come together summer after summer, whether they are completely in agreement or they’re on opposite sides of the table or they’re working together every year towards the exact same goal,” she said. “It’s the same community year after year — kind of like in this play, we have day after day — just choosing to show up.”
For the playwright, Tyler, one of the most influential parts of the play development process has been the breadth of feedback he has received from his peers over the course of the workshop. He said that he values specificity in his work, and having similarly-minded peers who offer feedback and propose new ideas ultimately moves the play forward in the revision process.
The workshopping process isn’t limited to the feedback of those directly involved, though. Audiences’ receptions to the play are often some of the most influential opportunities for revision and feedback.
“It’s a joy. I can’t wait to see this first public reading and what the audience (thinks),” said Tyler.
Carroll revels in how feedback during Pranayama’s brief run will shape the play and audiences once it leaves Chautauqua.
“I think Chautauqua is so lucky to be in a place that is in conversation with the fabric of the plays before they go into a national conversation,” Carroll said.
Likewise, Wolff stressed that viewers themselves play a very active part in the workshopping process for new works when plays are staged in their early iterations.
“They are not a passive part of the process,” she said. “They are a very active part of the new play development process and arguably the most important part of that process for the playwrights.”
In Tyler’s perspective, one of the most important things for audiences to know ahead of the play reading is that the play isn’t a static art piece, but instead a living piece that will morph and change between each showing.
“This is a living, breathing thing: It’s changing, it’s malleable,” he said. “We’re looking forward to what the audiences have to say; we’re looking forward to whether they’re going to laugh or not laugh. … It’s alive and it’s exciting.”
