New Work at Keen
About Our Initiatives
Keen has acquired extensive experience both with developing and premiering new work. Since 2013, Keen has worked intimately with mid-career writers in our Playwrights Lab to develop three new full-length plays each year. Since 2007, we have also commissioned and developed over 45 new one-act plays and three one-act musicals by professional writers as part of our Keen Teens program.
On our mainstage, Keen has produced several new plays: Boy by Anna Ziegler was co-produced with Ensemble Studio Theatre in 2016, When It’s You Courtney Baron was developed in our Keen Playwrights Lab then premiered on our mainstage in 2017, and Surely Goodness and Mercy by Chisa Hutchinson debuted in Spring 2019 as part of the National New Play Network’s rolling premiere program.
In 2022, Keen returned to the theater with the world premiere of This Space Between Us by Peter Gil-Sheridan. Most recently, in 2024 Keen partnered with the Working Theater to debut the world premiere of Fish by Kia Corthron which was originally developed in the Keen Playwrights Lab in 2018.
Kenny Finkle’s eight-part audio play with music, 1993, which started in our 2015 Playwrights Lab and developed with an NEA grant, premiered as part of our 2020-2021 Hear/Now Season of Audio Theater. During this pandemic inspired season of audio plays, Keen also commissioned and produced six other radio dramas including Digging in the Dark by Pearl Cleage, All We Need Is Us by James Anthony Tyler, Radio Nowhere by Kate Cortesi, Adventurephile by musical team Melissa Li and Kit Yan, The Telegram by Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, and That Old Perplexity by Deb Margolin.
Keen is currently working on developing the first full-length musical commission in our company’s history. We are in the third year of workshopping and developing a new intimate musical with book, music, and lyrics by Adam Gwon (Ordinary Days; Scotland, PA). The commission is to create an intimate musical which is small in scale but large in emotional impact. We believe the musical theater canon needs more musicals that connect. Keen and Adam Gwon last collaborated on the first New York revival of Ordinary Days which was nominated for the 2019 Drama League Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical. It is Keen’s hope to debut the new musical on our mainstage in the Spring of 2025, as part of our 25th Anniversary Season.
