The new season at Santa Fe Playhouse brings fresh faces, prominent playwrights

Jan. 26—The upcoming season at Santa Fe Playhouse doesn't just bring new plays and new playwrights to the community. It also brings a new way of doing business to the market.

The 100-seat theater, which has been running in some form for more than 100 years, is switching to a three-headed creative partnership in choosing its content. Familiar faces David Stallings and Antonio Miniño form two legs of the artistic director triumvirate, and the third spot will be filled by Anna Hogan, who arrives from the Wallace Theater in Levelland, Texas.

Miniño says their career intersected with Hogan's while both were working in New York. Colin Hovde remains the theater's executive director and is responsible for business and fundraising. Miniño and Stallings are partners off stage as well as on it, but they don't believe there will be any static in introducing a new chef to the kitchen.

"I think her aesthetic is a great complement," Miniño says of Hogan. "She has a very sharp mind. She's very innovative. She'll be the artistic director who is kind of heading the production department. She has a savvy way of getting things together, which is really exciting. And she also comes from a scrappy background when it comes to creating theater; she came up in the same way we did. She's very resourceful, which is very important for our size of theater."

Hogan's final production at the Wallace Theater is a two-week run of Legally Blonde: The Musical, which plays February 16 through March 3. She's already a part of the collaboration remotely, and Miniño says much of the 2024 season has already been decided.

details

* Catch the Sneak Peek offering highlights of the 2024 season at 7:30 p.m. on February 13 at the Santa Fe Playhouse. Tickets are pay-what-you-will.

* 142 E. De Vargas Street

* 505-988-4264; santafeplayhouse.org

The Santa Fe Playhouse season kicks off in earnest February 13 with a Sneak Peek event featuring live performances and video cameos from artists with prominent roles in upcoming productions. That event, held at the Playhouse, is presented as part of the Art+Sol Santa Fe Winter Arts Festival.

The season's performances will begin with two plays written by Liz Duffy Adams, and both are set in historical times. Or, is up first and will be directed by Zoe Burke; the second, Born With Teeth, will be directed by Miniño.

Both productions, Miniño says, involve the concept of taking famous playwrights from history and examining them with a modern perspective.

"I describe them as really exciting fan fiction," Miniño says. "It falls into this futurism idea of taking the past and seeing how it resonates today. But not just through the lens of the past; what if the way that the characters behave and the dialogue is more representative of today?"

Or, is set in the 1660s during the time of Aphra Behn, the first professional female playwright, and is said to have a bit of a 1960s sensibility. And Born Without Teeth stars two of the most famous playwrights of all as its main characters: Stallings will play William Shakespeare, and Marc Sinoway will play Christopher "Kit" Marlowe as they collaborate on Henry VI. That play, Miniño says, was recently re-examined by a team of scholars, and Marlowe has officially been credited as co-author. In Born Without Teeth, the playwright imagines what it must've been like for these two titans to work together.

"There's all this new historical information about how they probably collaborated," says Miniño of Shakespeare and Marlowe. "Liz Duffy Adams brilliantly said, 'What if I write a play about what it would be like for these two people to write Henry VI together, but also what if they also had a very friendly relationship between the two of them? And what if they were lovers as well?'"

The hard part in staging Or, and Born Without Teeth together is that they are set in very different times: Born Without Teeth is set in 1590, and Or, comes 70 years later. The challenge for scenic director James Johnson lay in creating a world evoking the mind of the plays' shared author.

"The scenic design is gonna be a bit abstract in a way that fits both worlds and has a lot to do with writing," Miniño says. "That's all I'm going to say."

Or, and Born Without Teeth will share the stage at Santa Fe Playhouse March 6-31, and then the focus will shift to Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me, from May 9 to June 2.

The latter was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2019, and Miniño says it was one of the most frequently produced plays in the country last year.

As we're in an election year, the play is topical again. The Santa Fe Playhouse version will be directed by Lynn Goodwin, and Kate Udall will play the playwright.

"The first half is Heidi's story and how she basically was able to pay through college by winning debate competitions," says Miniño. "She would debate about the Constitution. Should we keep it as is? Should we amend it? Or should we throw it out altogether and start a new one? That paid her way through college, but we also see how as a kid and growing up as a woman how her relationship with the Constitution changed and went from facts to affecting her personally. That's the first half of the piece; the second half, she gets to debate with a teenager. They debate and don't know until the night of the performance if she's going to be about amending it or about keeping it. The audience gets to ask questions as well, so it turns into this really wonderful participatory event."

That latter part, Miniño notes, is not scripted, so it keeps the performers on their toes with each performance. An interesting aspect of the play — and the Constitution — is that our government's main charter document has changed throughout the years, and it's changed since Schreck wrote the play in 2017. The specter of Roe v. Wade still hangs over the writing; it's mentioned in depth as a seminal moment in the nation's history, and since the play's writing, it is no longer in effect as a binding decision.

"When she talks about it, she talks about getting Roe v. Wade and what that did to the movement," Miniño says. "It's a living document, and having that be a part of living theater was just really brilliant on her part. It's really impactful."