New plays ring in the new year at The Goodman when the popular annual New Stages Festival returns. This year’s line-up features the newest works by some of the country’s hottest playwrights, including This Part of His Life Blooms by Christina Anderson (the ripple, the wave that carried me home); The Audience Unseen by Ike Holter (Lottery Day); Pennies by Hansol Jung (Wolf Play) and FEAST! by Calamity West (In the Canyon). Under Walter Artistic Director Susan V. Booth and Director of New Works Kat Zukaitis, this annual offering showcases works-in-progress; each play will be read twice in the intimate 350-seat Owen Theatre. New Stages is offered as part of The Goodman’s 100 Free Acts of Theater initiative, a citywide yearlong event presented together with Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) which activates each of Chicago’s 50 wards with free arts programming. Theater industry professionals are invited to Professionals Weekend (January 16-18), which includes special events and opportunities for networking—including the new Dramatists Exchange initiative, a multi-day event which gathers Chicago dramatists for workshops and dialogue with New Stages artists and Goodman artistic staff. New Stages appears January 11-18; tickets are free and available starting December 15 at the Box Office (170 N. Dearborn), over the phone at 312.443.3800 or online at GoodmanTheatre.org/NewStagesFestival. Theater professionals interested in Industry Weekend should RSVP by December 19 at GoodmanTheatre.org/ProfessionalsWeekend. The Goodman is grateful for the support of The Joyce Foundation (Major Support for Diverse Artistic and Professional Development).
Since New Stages’ 2004 inception, more than 125 plays have been produced as developmental productions and staged readings. The Goodman’s Centennial 25/26 Season includes three works that debuted as New Stages readings—Lee Kirk’s Ashland Avenue, Zayd Ayers Dohrn and Tom Morello’s Revolution(s) and Marco Antonio Rodriguez’s English adaptation of Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, running February 21 – April 5, 2026.
2026 NEW STAGES FESTIVAL LINE-UP
FEAST!
By Calamity West
Directed by Susan V. Booth
Readings: January 11 at 2pm and January 17 at 2pm
Carol just got fired. Her husband Michael has already paid for the company’s $12,000 holiday dinner. Instead of canceling, they decide to go through with it — to host the meal no one asked for and prove they still belong at the table. But when no guests arrive, the night spirals into a brutal showdown over money, marriage, and the cost of holding on, where the only thing left to swallow is the truth. Calamity West's FEAST! is a darkly comic pressure cooker about privilege and power.
Calamity West is an award-winning playwright and educator whose work has been developed and produced nationally at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Public, Roundabout Underground, the Goodman Theatre, and Jackalope Theatre Company – to name a few. From 2022 to 2026 she is in residency at Primary Stages through the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group, where she has written FEAST! and Sgt. Hank Cole’s Drama Club of Algona. She is concluding her residency with Parallax (2026), a new play exploring community, power, and the fragile order of HOAs. West teaches at the University of Chicago, the Einhorn School of Performing Arts, Webster University, and through the Jackalope Playwrights Lab, which she founded in 2018.
Pennies
By Hansol Jung
Directed by Patricia McGregor
Readings: January 13 at 7pm and January 16 at 7pm
Amid an epidemic of heartbreak, a weary counselor with a unique gift disappears. She finds herself in a surreal motel outside time, where she must strike a cosmic bargain with Charon, the ferryman of the dead. Spanning centuries, from a call center to the River Styx to the farthest future, Hansol Jung’s Pennies is a wild, aching odyssey about grief, guilt and the impossible task of caring too much in a world that keeps trying to harden us.
Hansol Jung’s works include Last Call (En Garde Arts), Merry Me (NYTW), Wolf Play (Soho Rep & Ma-Yi), Wild Goose Dreams (Public Theater & La Jolla), Romeo and Juliet (NAATCO & Two River) Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi), and No More Sad Things (Boise Contemporary). TV & Film: Pachinko (Apple +), Tales of the City (Netflix) including development with Amazon Studios, and Apple + TV. Hansol is the recipient of the Lucille Lortel award for Best Play, Obie Award, Herb Alpert Award, Steinberg Award, Whiting Award, Helen Merrill Award, Hodder Fellowship, Page 73 Fellowship, Lark’s Rita Goldberg Fellowship, NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship, three-time MacDowell Fellowship, and International Playwrights Residency at Royal Court. She is a proud member of NYTW’s Usual Suspects, the Kilroys and a founding member of The Pack.
This Part of His Life Blooms
By Christina Anderson
Directed by Malkia Stampley
Readings: January 14 at 7pm and January 18 at 11am
Arthur Beverly James finds himself alone on the night of his retirement. After a lifetime of loving and losing the same woman, Arthur turns to the soil—to the yard he’s ignored for decades—and begins to dig. With each seed, each root, each memory, he reckons with friendship, fatherhood and the quiet ghosts of his past. In Christina Anderson’s This Part of His Life Blooms, grief becomes growth as a man learns, at last, to tend the garden of himself.
Christina Anderson’s plays include: the ripple, the wave that carried me home, How to Catch Creation, and pen/man/ship. Her work has been produced across the country including theaters such as Berkeley Rep, Goodman Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, and Yale Rep. A Tony nominated writer for Outstanding Book of a Broadway musical, Anderson has received the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, the Horton Foote Prize, and the United States Artists Fellowship, among many other honors. She is the author of Three Plays by Christina Anderson, a collection of her work published by Tripwire Harlot Press. She’s taught playwriting at Rutgers University, SUNY Purchase, Wesleyan University, Brown, and YSD. Since 2019, she’s also been exploring music production under the moniker Purely Magenta, creating hip-hop instrumentals that reflect her inquisitive spirit. Current writing project: a book that explores playwriting as an accessible artistic life practice.
The Audience Unseen
By Ike Holter
Directed by Gus Menary
Dramaturgy by Sarah Slight
Readings: January 17 at 7pm and January 18 at 3pm
In a flickering interrogation room, a federal agent pushes a grocery clerk to "see" what no one else can. But what starts as a simple questioning spirals into something more terrifying than either party could ever imagine. Ike Holter's The Audience Unseen is a supernatural thriller, told in real-time, about the steep cost of traveling into darkness.
Ike Holter is a Chicago writer whose work includes the seven-play Rightlynd Saga, Kid Cudi’s To The Moon concert special, and FX’s Fosse/Verdon, for which he won the WGA award for Best Adaptation. His plays are published through Northwestern Publishing, Methuen Books, Dramatists Play Service and have been performed in all 50 states. He’s the winner of the Steinberg Award and The Windham-Campbell award, one of the highest honors in contemporary literature. He’s taught at Yale, University of Chicago, The Kennedy Center and DePaul’s Theater School. Goodman has produced the world premieres of Lottery Day and I Hate It Here.
ABOUT THE GOODMAN
Since 1925, The Goodman has been more than a stage. A theatrical home for artists and a gathering space for community, it’s where stories come to life—bold in artistry and rich in history, deeply rooted in the city it serves.
Led by Walter Artistic Director Susan V. Booth and Executive Director John Collins, The Goodman sparks conversation, connection and change through new plays, reimagined classics and large-scale musicals. With distinctions including nearly 200 world or American premieres, two Pulitzer Prizes, 22 Tony Awards and nearly 200 Joseph Jefferson Awards, The Goodman is proud to be the first theater to produce all 10 plays of August Wilson’s “American Century Cycle.” In addition, the theater frequently serves as a production partner—with national and international companies to Chicago’s Off-Loop theaters—to help amplify theatrical voices.
But The Goodman believes a more empathetic, more connected Chicago is created one story at a time, and counts as its greatest legacy the community it’s built. Generation-spanning productions and programs offer theater for a lifetime; from Theater for the Very Young (plays designed for ages 0-5) to the long-running annual A Christmas Carol, which has introduced new generations to theater over five decades, The Goodman is committed to being an asset for all of Chicago. Education and Engagement programs led by Clifford Director of Education and Engagement Jared Bellot and housed in the Alice Rapoport Center use the tools of theater to spark imagination, reflection and belonging. Each year, these programs reach thousands of people (85% from underserved communities) as well as educators, artists and lifelong learners across the city.
The Goodman stands on the unceded homelands of the Council of the Three Fires—the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations—and acknowledges the many other Nations for whom this land now called Chicago has long been home, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo, and Mascouten. The Goodman is proud to partner with the Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum (Gichigamiin-Museum.org) and the Center for Native Futures (CenterForNativeFutures.org)—organizations devoted to honoring Indigenous stories, preserving cultural memory, and deepening public understanding.
The Goodman was founded by William O. Goodman and his family to honor the memory of Kenneth Sawyer Goodman—a visionary playwright whose bold ideas helped shape Chicago’s early cultural renaissance. That spirit of creativity and generosity endures today. In 2000, through the commitment of Mr. Goodman’s descendants—Albert Ivar Goodman and his late mother, Edith-Marie Appleton—The Goodman opened the doors to its current home in the heart of the Loop.
Marsha Cruzan is Chair of the Goodman Theatre Board of Trustees; Diane Landgren is Women’s Board President; and Kelli Garcia is president of the Scenemakers Board for Young Professionals.