history

The Hangar Theatre Wedge: FutureNow Festival evolved last summer from the Hangar’s Wedge Series, which was established in 1983 by former Hangar Artistic Director Robert Moss to showcase timely, inventive productions produced by members of the Hangar Theatre’s pre-professional fellowship programs. Projects are typically conceived and directed by Hangar Drama League Directing Fellows (now the FutureNow Fellows) and cast with Hangar Lab Performance Fellows.

The 2023 FutureNow Wedge Reading Series

The 2023 FutureNow Wedge Reading Series will be presented both downtown at Community School of Music and Arts (CSMA) and at the Hangar and will highlight the local community of artists and writers living and working in Tompkins County. The series will provide an opportunity for Ithaca-based creatives to work in collaboration with the company of emerging artists in residence at the Hangar. This summer, the series features new play readings of scripts by central NY-based writers that tackle regionally-specific themes, such as how we utilize humanities, specifically the dramatic arts, to instigate thinking and dialogue about life’s big questions.

FREE FOR OUR COMMUNITY

Friday, July 28, 2 p.m.
The Hangar Theatre

Saturday, July 29, 3 p.m.
Community School of Music and Arts (CSMA)

______________________________________________________________

CASTLE on the HILL

By Elizabeth Mozer

Directed by Alex Keegan

CASTLE on the HILL is a full-length play based on the stunning true events that weave together the lives of a Polish immigrant, a psychiatric hospital’s patients, and a woman following the clues of her past. Their experiences are intimately connected to the Binghamton State Hospital in upstate New York and unfold over the course of six decades. Drawn from personal accounts, historical documents and imaginings, these twelve individuals are brought to life in this movement-infused drama. Their remarkable stories, once silenced, are now given voice.

LAB RATS

By Saviana Stanescu

Directed by Héctor Álvarez

LAB RATS shows the difficult relationship between an immigrant artist with an anxious-preoccupied attachment style and a neuroscientist with a dismissive-avoidant attachment style, observed by one of the rats in the scientist’s lab.

AIRBORN

By Evan Starling-Davis

Directed by EJ Soto

Mission after mission, the Tuskegee Airmen flew across the world to fight for a country that deemed them unsuited for aviation. Through compiled voices of WWII, our main character, ACE, finds himself recollecting the journey in becoming a pilot of the United States Army Air Corps in a time where Black pilots weren’t accepted, and our nation was still deeply rooted in segregation. Glory lasts as long as a day when one is fighting a war abroad and at home.

________________________________________________________________

This program is made possible with funds from the Statewide
Community Regrants program from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the
support of the office of the Governor and NYS Legislature, and from Tompkins County;
administered by the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.