Why Top NYC Nonprofits Are Looking to The Bushwick Starr for Their Next Shows

The theatre’s current wave of Manhattan transfers reveals how a small Brooklyn institution became one of the city’s most successful incubators

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When local businesses expand, they sometimes strip geographical markers from their names—see St. Louis Bread Company (now Panera Bread) or the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (better known as 3M). But when the Obie-winning Bushwick Starr left its longtime digs on Starr Street for a new home in a former dairy plant on the other side of the neighborhood, founders Sue Kessler and Noel Allain never even considered changing the moniker. They knew adventurous audiences associated their name with bold, cutting-edge, genre-nonconforming shows, and that wasn’t going to change.

While a handful of productions developed at The Bushwick Starr over the past two decades have ended up in Manhattan theatres, this spring marks a watershed moment for the institution: Two of its recent productions have transferred, Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Rheology to Playwrights Horizons (through May 29) and Julia May Jonas’ A Woman Among Women to Lincoln Center Theater (May 16 to June 28), while Heather Christian’s Animal Wisdom, which The Starr premiered in 2017, is getting a new mounting at Signature Theatre Company (through June 14). Meanwhile in Brooklyn, they keep incubating new work: you can see Michael Oluokun’s interactive solo experimental Have You Ever Thought About at The Starr through May 16.

With a chuckle, Kessler calls this milestone “our proof-of-concept spring.” The Starr is still a developmental space, and its leaders don’t select projects with the intention of cultivating transfers, but Allain acknowledges it’s a nice bonus. “This is the ecosystem of making new performance in New York at its best,” he says. “We develop something from scratch and see how it works, and the dream is that it moves on to a larger organization that can expand its audience and expose even more people to the work.”

Jonas has been affiliated with institution since it was just a rehearsal space for experiment theatre more than 20 years ago. “Beyond anything else, The Starr has been an artistic home,” she says. As The Starr developed into a neighborhood arts center and, eventually, a presenting organization, Jonas started writing more traditional plays. These days she’s also an acclaimed novelist and the showrunner of a Netflix miniseries based on her book Vladimir. At this point in her career, she keeps coming back to The Starr because the organization continues to champion innovation. As Kessler and Allain raised money to build a new venue and raise artist compensation, Jonas says, “They’ve been miraculously able to maintain their character and their interests. Whatever resources they have, they have put into the art.”

Christian, a composer and playwright who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant last fall, agrees. Working at The Starr was an inflection point in her career. “It was the first shot anyone had ever given me,” she recalls. “I had self-produced before—shows where there was no money, so everything was on a favor economy.” But The Starr offered her tangible production support and artistic stewardship along with creative freedom. “I joke that they gave me the keys to my own car,” she says.

Jonas and Christian say The Starr has always been a place where they can experiment with form. As an example, Jonas recalls a split bill she conceived with the choreographer Jenny MaryTai Liu in 2005, which featured Christian as a dancer and musician. That breadth of form and content is visible in The Starr’s projects on view across the city right now: Rheology is a deeply personal piece in which Chowdhury and his mother, the theoretical physicist Bulbul Chakraborty, use her research on the physics of sand as an incitement to explore mortality, grief and their shifting bond. A riff on Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, A Woman Among Women is a feminist ensemble piece about communal idealism and moral compromise in modern progressive spaces. Animal Wisdom is a haunting, electrifying “musical séance” for a solo vocalist—an autobiographical role originated by Christian and now played by Tony nominee Kenita Miller. Have You Ever Thought About is a group thought experiment that takes the form of a comedy show.

These daring, singular projects reflect the importance of collaboration across the theatre community: The original production of Animal Wisdom was coproduced by West Yorkshire Playhouse in the United Kingdom; A Woman Among Women received support from New Georges; Rheology was produced with HERE and Ma-Yi Theater Company. And yet despite their range, the shows share some common elements. As Allain notes: “In all four of them, people speak directly to you: there’s not a lot of fourth wall there.” A Woman Among Women and Rheology even seat cast members in the audience to further eradicate that divide.

Chowdhury believes his sui generis show only exists because of The Starr. “It’s my favorite kind of support—skilled, competent, creative, flexible support from a theatre staff that doesn’t feel like scrutiny,” he says. “This is such a weird piece to produce… The fact that we stepped into the first rehearsal without a script says a lot about the willingness of the team at The Starr to go with real scary things.”

Though these shows are scattered across the city, their respective producers hope The Starr’s DNA is apparent in each of them. Christian says that’s definitely the case for the revival of Animal Wisdom, despite its differences from the original mounting. “We’ve tried to make it feel like it’s at the old Starr,” she says. “We didn’t copy the layout or anything, but the vibe of living in an attic, living in a theatre that was haunted by passion and desire and chutzpah is something we ran with.”

That feeling—the sense of a theatre animated by “passion and desire and chutzpah”—may be harder to quantify than a transfer or a hit production. But it’s also what so many artists say makes The Bushwick Starr distinct: even as its work reaches bigger stages, the company continues to make theatre that feels handmade, risky and alive.

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