Drawing inspiration from concerts that evolved from Brooklyn front porches to its own rooftop balcony and large-scale exhibitions mounted on its exterior facade, St. Ann’s Warehouse returns, merging public art, theater, and activism at a whole new level. In September, St. Ann’s gathers hundreds of artists, cultural, and community-based organizations to welcome Little Amal, a 12’ tall puppet of a Syrian refugee child, with 55 events across the city. Immediately following, St. Ann’s invites new and longtime international collaborators into its home to stage imaginative works of passion, pathos, humor, and song.

St. Ann’s Warehouse Artistic Director Susan Feldman says, “It’s been a long, gradual emergence back to our home base, with revelations and epiphanies along the way. We’ve made new relationships and sustained long-distance friends we feared we might never see again. And all are reflected in this gangbuster season—from free public art on our building and concerts in Brooklyn Bridge Park (including Arturo O’Farrill’s Fandango at the Wall to 4,000 people last month), to the return of Emma Rice and a new collaboration with Mira Nair. Walking with Little Amal and so many of our cultural and community-based allies, we fully embrace our human family, committed to art as our catalyst for survival and change.”

One city, five boroughs, seventeen days, fifty-five events. From September 14–October 2, St. Ann’s Warehouse and The Walk Productions co-produce Little Amal Walks NYC, an epic journey, and a public art project of unprecedented scale. Amal, designed by Handspring Puppet Company (War Horse), is coming to New York after journeying 5,000 miles from the Turkish/Syrian border across Europe—including, most recently, Ukraine. She walks for hundreds of thousands of refugees and marginalized people roaming the world in search of safety, half of whom are children.  Amal has been welcomed by mayors of capital cities, world-renowned artists, and even His Holiness Pope Francis. Over a million people—and tens of millions online—have joined her. Little Amal NYC is her first U.S. visit.

Devising this colossal collective undertaking are playwright/director Amir Nizar Zuabi, Artistic Director of The Walk Productions, and Yazmany Arboleda, New York City’s first “People’s Artist,” who serves as the Creative Producer of the New York visit. BAM President Emerita Karen Brooks Hopkins is Executive Producer. St. Ann’s Warehouse (Susan Feldman, Erik Wallin) and The Walk Productions are the producers (David Lan, Tracey Seaward).

On the heels of Amal’s walk, Emma Rice and her company Wise Children bring their joyous theater-making to St. Ann’s Warehouse for the U.S. premiere of Wuthering Heights, October 14-November 6. St. Ann’s has been Rice’s New York home since 2009, having presented her Brief Encounter, Tristan & Yseult, The Red Shoes, The Wild Bride, and 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips. Now Rice unleashes her vast arsenal of theatrical tricks upon Emily Brontë’s dark classic in a “wild and exhilarating” adaptation that “unleashes the fire and fury of Brontë’s genius” (Daily Telegraph). In a four-star review, The Guardian wrote, “Retelling the gothic novel with intelligently charming humor and a live band, this is a bold and ingenious production.” Wuthering Heights is a National Theatre, Wise Children, Bristol Old Vic, and York Theatre Royal co-production presented in association with Berkeley Repertory Theater.

Continuing its rich history of introducing Ireland’s most imaginative theater artists to American audiences, St. Ann’s Warehouse presents the U.S. premiere of Gina Moxley’s punk-infused The Patient Gloria, a collaboration with the Dublin-based company Pan Pan, November 16-December 4. Directed by John McIlduff, The Patient Gloria sends up Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, an influential 1965 series of training films that were never supposed to be seen by the public. Moxley’s mockery reveals a legacy of misogyny with candor and biting humor. Reviewing the world premiere at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe, where it won the coveted Scotsman Fringe First and Herald Angel Awards, The Fest wrote that The Patient Gloria “grabs psychiatry by the balls,” and The Evening Standard proclaimed it a “funny, feminist analysis of how female sexuality has been always recorded through the male gaze.”

Amal is inspired by a character in Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s immersive play The Jungle, an intense remembrance of the bulldozed refugee camp in Calais, France. It triumphantly returns to St. Ann’s Warehouse February 18-March 19, 2023, after its acclaimed, sold-out American Premiere in 2018. A co-production with Good Chance Theatre, of the original National Theatre, Young Vic and Good Chance Theatre production, The Jungle recreates the Afghan Flag – a restaurant of plywood tables, ill-matching pillows and benches, and a rickety patchwork roof. A warm, self-governing society comes to life, built by immigrants and refugees who have escaped drought, war, and strife in Africa and the Middle East to wait for their “good chance” passage to Britain. In a Critic’s Pick New York Times review, Ben Brantley wrote, “The Jungle arrives here with bruising relevance. It feels as if all the world is holding its breath.” The child in the play was the inspiration behind Little Amal, described above.

Acclaimed film director Mira Nair adapts her own beloved film, 2002’s Monsoon Wedding, as a musical theater production, which will arrive at St. Ann’s Warehouse in May 2023. Critic Roger Ebert deemed it “one of those joyous films that leaps over national boundaries and celebrates universal human nature.” Monsoon Wedding surrounds the leadup to an elaborate wedding in Delhi—an arranged marriage precariously beset by modern tensions—as members of the bride and groom-to-be’s families convene from all parts of the world. The production features a book by Sabrina Dhawan and Arpita Mukherjee, music by Vishal Bhardwaj, and lyrics by Masi Asare and Susan Birkenhead. St. Ann’s Warehouse plays a vital role on the global cultural landscape as an American artistic home for international companies of distinction, American avant-garde masters and talented emerging artists ready to work on a grand scale. St. Ann’s signature flexible, open space allows artists to stretch, both literally and imaginatively, enabling them to approach work with unfettered creativity, knowing that the theater can be adapted in multiple configurations to suit their needs.

In the heart of Brooklyn Bridge Park, St. Ann’s Warehouse is a spectacular waterfront theater that opened in October 2015. The new Joseph S. and Diane H. Steinberg Theater offers St. Ann’s signature versatility and grandeur on an amplified scale while respecting the walls of an original 1860’s Tobacco Warehouse. The building complex includes a studio for smaller-scale events and community uses, a welcoming foyer/exhibit space, and The Max Family Garden, designed by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and open to Brooklyn Bridge Park visitors during Park hours. 

Over four decades of consistently acclaimed landmark productions that found their American heart and home at St. Ann’s include Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s Songs for ‘Drella; Marianne Faithfull’s Breaking Away and Seven Deadly Sins; Artistic Director Susan Feldman’s Band in Berlin; Charlie Kaufman and the Coen Brothers’ Theater of the New Ear; The Royal Court and TR Warszawa productions of Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis; The Globe Theatre of London’s Measure for Measure with Mark Rylance; Druid Company’s The Walworth Farce, The New Electric Ballroom and Penelope by Enda Walsh and the Landmark / Galway International Arts Festival Productions of Walsh’s Misterman, featuring Cillian Murphy, Ballyturk and Arlington; Lou Reed’s Berlin; the National Theater of Scotland’s Black Watch and Let the Right One In; Kneehigh Theatre’s Brief Encounter, 946 and Tristan & Yseult; Yael Farber’s Mies Julie; Dmitry Krymov Lab’s Opus No. 7; the Donmar Warehouse all-female Shakespeare Trilogy directed by Phyllida Lloyd: Julius Caesar, Henry IV, The Tempest; Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients; Tricycle Theatre’s Red Velvet, the Young Vic production of  A Streetcar Named Desire with Gillian Anderson; Mark Rylance’s Nice Fish, the National Theatre’s People, Places & Things, and the World Premiere of the complete Taylor Mac’s A 24 Decade History of Popular Music, including the one-time only 24-hour marathon in 2016. St. Ann’s has championed such artists as The Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, Jeff Buckley, Cynthia Hopkins, Daniel Kitson, Emma Rice and Kneehigh, Hal Willner’s multi-artist tribute concerts, and an historic David Bowie concert in 2002. Prior to the pandemic, St. Ann’s produced a reimagined Oklahoma! directed by Daniel Fish, in association with the Bard Fisher Center and co-producer Eva Price, which went on to win the 2019 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical; the Gate Theatre Dublin’s acclaimed Hamlet, directed by Yael Farber,  featured a knockout performance by Academy Award and Tony nominee Ruth Negga; and an astonishing play about refugees, The Jungle, a Good Chance Theatre co-production with London’s  National Theatre and The Young Vic will return for a second run next March. During the COVID-19 pandemic, St. Ann’s has reconfigured its facade and rooftop balconies for public art presentations of music and visual art, bringing artists back to work and offering its arches, walls, and lightboxes to BIPOC artists such as Supremacy Project, committed to ending violence through art.