Adjunct Assistant Professor Kate Loewald, Founding Producer of The Play Company (PlayCo), and Theatre alumna Annie Wang ’20, PlayCo’s Communications and Marketing Manager, will assist in the presentation of the virtual performance This Is Who I Am via PlayCo’s collaboration with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.
Loewald founded PlayCo with her late partners, Mark Ockrent and Jack Temchin, in 1998. Since then, PlayCo has produced 37 plays with premieres spanning the globe. PlayCo commissions, develops, and produces new plays in its effort “to create contemporary theatre that reflects and responds to both our New York City home and today’s interconnected world.”
Written by Amir Nizar Zuabi and directed by Evren Odcikin, This Is Who I Am is a live broadcast performance. It features an estranged father and son who reunite on Zoom. One lives in Ramallah; the other lives in New York City. Together on the screen but apart in distant kitchens, they cook a beloved family recipe and attempt to mend their relationship. Woolly Mammoth calls the play “a balancing act of care and resentment, closeness and vast separation.”
Loewald was the head of the literary department at Manhattan Theatre Club from 1990 to 1999 and collaborated with numerous playwrights and directors: Terrence McNally, Jon Robin Baitz, Richard Greenberg, Donald Margulies, Elizabeth Swados, Cheryl West, Kia Corthron, Joe Mantello, Mark Brokaw and Nicholas Martin, among others.
She is the creator of the MTC Playwriting Fellowships for emerging writers and was also the director of MTC’s acclaimed Writers in Performance Series in 1998 and 1999. There, she produced an original program of literary events, which featured writers and performances such as Walter Mosley, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Gish Jen, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, Buck Henry, Anita Desai, Robert Pinsky, Sydney Schanberg, and Arnold Wesker.
Before her time at MTC, Loewald was Producing Associate to Margo Lion on George C. Wolfe’s Jelly’s Last Jam, Martha Clarke’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and other plays on and off Broadway.
Wang is a dramaturg, writer, and visual artist whose work centers on “decolonizing the artist process.” Her work chiefly explores “constructs of race, gender, and citizenship through a compassionate and critical lens.” Her collaborators have received acknowledgement from The Public Emerging Writers Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The National Playwrights Conference, Playwrights’ Center, and the Bay Area Playwrights Foundation, among others.
This Is Who I Am will run from December 5, 2020 to January 3, 2020.
