The Hermitage Artist Retreat is pleased to announce a new partnership with the Tony Award-winning Roundabout Theatre Company, the nation’s largest not-for-profit theater with a celebrated history of producing iconic works for nearly 60 years. The partnership, designed to continue on an ongoing basis, furthers the Hermitage’s mission to inspire and foster the most influential and culturally consequential art and artists of our time. This collaboration will provide an opportunity for some of the theater world’s most exciting new voices to explore their work on the historic Hermitage campus before a potential production at one of the country’s most prestigious theatrical institutions. The inaugural year of this new partnership will launch this summer with playwrights York Walker and Dave Harris.
York Walker, an award-winning playwright and screenwriter from Chicago, is the inaugural recipient of the Vineyard Theatre’s Colman Domingo Award and is also a member of Marcus Gardley’s New Wave Writer’s Workshop. His work includes The Séance (Winner of the John Singleton Short Film Competition, 48 Hours… in Harlem), Covenant (Fire This Time Festival, Access Theatre’s 4 Flights Up Festival), White Shoes (Fire This Time Festival), Summer Of ’63 (The Actors Company Theatre’s New TACTics Festival, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville’s Apprentice Reading Series) and Of Dreams To Come (American Conservatory Theatre’s New Work Series). His play Covenant is scheduled to premiere as part of the Roundabout Underground Series in the fall of 2023.
Dave Harris is a poet and playwright based in Philadelphia whose work Tambo & Bones premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2022. Other works for the stage include Exception to the Rule (Roundabout Theatre Company, 2022), and Everybody Black (Humana Festival 2019). His first feature film, Summertime premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was released in 2021. Selected honors include: the 2019 Ollie Award, The Lorraine Hansberry Award and Mark Twain Award from The Kennedy Center, The International Commendation for The Bruntwood Prize, the Venturous Fellowship from The Lark, and a Cave Canem poetry fellowship amongst others. Harris is currently writing several features and television projects for AMC (Interview with the Vampire), FX, and Amazon. His first full-length collection of poetry, Patricide, was published by Button Poetry. Upcoming: Incendiary (Woolly Mammoth, 2023), Tambo & Bones (Royal Stratford East, London Premiere, 2023).
“We are honored to be launching this exciting collaboration with Roundabout Theatre Company,” added Hermitage Artistic Director and CEO Andy Sandberg. “We are proud to be a leading national incubator for new and original works, and as Roundabout deepens its commitment to championing new voices, this partnership provides emerging and innovative playwrights with a ‘full circle’ journey.”
Harris and Walker are not the only overlapping Hermitage and Roundabout Underground artists. Adam Gwon, whose musical Ordinary Days premiered at the Underground in 2009, went on to develop his musical Scotland, PA (with playwright Michael Mitnick) at the Hermitage Artist Retreat before its premiere at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre in 2019. Other notable mutual artists include Tigers Be Still playwright Kim Rosenstock, who was recently in residence at the Hermitage developing a new commission for Roundabout, amongst other emerging and established theater artists.