Signature Theatre’s 2024-25 Season Will Include World Premieres by Dominique Morisseau and Samuel D. Hunter

Signature Theatre announced its 2024-2025 season, the ninth and final season of works programmed by outgoing artistic director Paige Evans. The season also concludes Sarah Ruhl and Dominique Morisseau’s residencies with the company. Featuring three Signature commissions and one revisitation of a previous work, the season showcases Signature’s support for writers at multiple phases of careers. The season includes Dominique Morisseau’s world premiere play Bad Kreyol, Samuel D. Hunter’s world premiere play Grangeville, a revival of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, and a developmental presentation of Melis Aker’s Fish.

Premiere Resident Dominique Morisseau’s Bad Kreyol, directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene and commissioned by Signature, will premiere in the fall of 2024. In it, she probes America’s relationship to Haiti, a place severely impacted by American imperialism, in the story of a visiting Haitian American’s awakening to the cultural baggage she’s carrying, and the shortcomings and condescensions of American understandings of “doing good.” Simone, first generation Haitian American, and her cousin Gigi, Haitian born and raised, reunite to honor their grandmother’s dying wish for them to reconnect.

Samuel D. Hunter’s Signature-commissioned Grangeville, which takes its title from the remote Idaho town of the same name, will have its world premiere in the winter of 2025. Two estranged half brothers—one in Grangeville, one in Amsterdam—reconnect virtually in discussions surrounding care for their ailing mother.

Spotlight Resident Sarah Ruhl finishes her residency reuniting with director Les Waters. The two artists collaborated in 2006 for the world premiere production of Ruhl’s Eurydice at Yale Repertory Theatre and return to the play in spring of 2025 with a new vision. Ruhl reframed the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus—so often reduced to Orpheus’ infamous mistake — around Eurydice’s relationship to her father, whom she re-encounters in the underworld.

The coming season also features a developmental presentation of a new, Signature-commissioned work from its first-ever LaunchPad Resident, Melis Aker, with four invite-only presentations of Fish in September. The LaunchPad Residency guarantees a developmental opportunity to an emerging playwright, as well as a full production, either of that work or another commissioned work. Fish, directed by Tatiana Pandiani, reveals the complexities of mother-daughter and best-friend relationships and the alienation and vulnerability of our identities online. In London in 2016, Karya, a British-Turkish teen, embarks on a mission to confront the unresolved disappearance of her brother and catfishes ISIS with her best friend.