Manhattan Theater Club and Ars Nova Announce Recipients of Inaugural Commissions

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Thomas Bradshaw

Two prominent New York theaters, Manhattan Theater Club and Ars Nova, announced on Tuesday that they have chosen five playwrights as the first recipients of their new Writer's Room commissions. The commissions are worth between $5,000 and $10,000 a piece and are geared to developing works for possible Off Broadway productions at the theaters. The inaugural commissions will go to Thomas Bradshaw (“Job”), Samuel D. Hunter (“The Whale”), and Sharyn Rothstein (“The Invested”); a fourth commission will be shared by Adam Bock (“A Small Fire”) and Justin Levine (“Bonfire Night ”), who are developing a new musical.

Such commissions are increasingly common as nonprofit theaters try to forge stronger ties with their favorite writers, enabling them financially to remain playwrights (rather than move into television and film work) and helping spur new works that might run in the theaters someday. Mr. Hunter, for one, whose Off Broadway play “The Whale” has made him a hot commodity, is juggling commissions for several theaters nationwide and is also already a member of the Playwrights Ensemble group at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.

The Writer's Room grew out of a collaboration in 2008 when Ars Nova turned to Manhattan Theater Club, which has larger budgets and facilities, about producing a new play by Liz Flahive, “From Up Here,† that Ars Nova had developed but did not have the space and money to stage itself. “From Up Here” opened at the club that spring to good reviews, but the national economic recession that year limited the abilities of the two theaters (like many others) to spend money on new programs like the Writer's Room.

“We wanted to do this again, but on purpose this time,” said Mandy Greenfield, the artistic producer of Manhattan Theater Club, in an interview on Tuesday. “And now we have four new commissions that would not have existed if we had not come together.”

She said the commissions have been financed out of the budgets of the two theaters, but added that they would seek private and foundation support for the Writer's Room as well. The plan is to award four commissions annually, though the writers would not be expected to finish work in a single year. Full productions are not guaranteed, but Ms. Greenfield said she hoped some of the new works would run at the club's newly configured space, MTC Studio at Stage II, where the critically praised “Murder Ballad” just concluded its run. (Some theater producers have expressed interest in remounting “Murder Ballad” elsewhere in New York, but those discussions are nascent and Ms. Greenfield declined to comment on them.)

Ars Nova, a more experimental theater company than Manhattan Theater Club, recently had a critical and audience hit with “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” which also may re-open elsewhere next year. Jason Eagan, artistic director of Ars Nova, said that his small theater had only so much flexibility to extend shows like “The Great Comet” and produce newly co mmissioned works â€" hence the decision to team up with Manhattan Theater Club.

“We want Ars Nova to remain a very focused boutique theater,” he said, “but we also want to commission more writers and not be limited by our producing resources.”