The Work
Fools’ Paradise
May 1–10, 2025. The world premiere of Fools’ Paradise by co-Artistic Director Jonathan Winn, directed by James Dean Palmer.
Two couples arrive at an opulent Caribbean resort for the getaway of a lifetime. A sudden emergency derails it, and as the situation unfolds, differences in worldview threaten their friendships, their sense of themselves, and their survival.
With Julia Atwood, Dana Eskelson, Steven Hauck, and Allan Hayhurst.
CT Short Play Fest
August 2, 2025. Eleven new plays directed by Peter Charney. Eight actors, four celebrity judges, two sessions, one winner: Light the Menorah, a cross-cultural romantic comedy by Deborah Yarchun.
The Waterfall
June 2025. We announced that The Waterfall by Phanésia Pharel would premiere off-Broadway in a co-production with WP Theater, and spent the rest of the year in pre-production.
Ms. Pharel came to us in 2021 as one of three playwrights commissioned for The Suburbs, our outdoor season performed at three Ridgefield landmarks. In 2022 she became the inaugural 068 Magazine Playwriting Fellow, receiving a six-month stipend, dramaturgical support, and a workshop. The Waterfall began during that fellowship and won the Kennedy Center’s Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award in 2024.
The Gathering – Pop Up
November 6, 2025. We opened the Crystal Theatre for a pop-up party with live music, short performances, cocktails, and a charcuterie board of some ambition. We co-sponsored it with the City of Norwalk Cultural Council and the Greater Norwalk Chamber of Commerce.
It was a networking event rather than a performance, and it did what those events do: it put us in a room with people who work in Norwalk and had not heard of us.
The Waterfall
Returning home to assist her mother after a hospitalization, Haitian-American Bean soon finds her confidence shaken by her mother’s idea of what her life should be. Stuck at home, with nowhere to run from her mother’s ideas of marriage, motherhood, and malady, Bean must ask, “Do you know who you want to be? And are you brave enough to own it?” The Waterfall is an intimate and aching two-hander about the generational divides around family, womanhood, and the idea of the American Dream.
January 31 – March 1, 2026
A co-production with WP Theater
CT Short Play Fest ‘26
Returning in August, the CT Short Play Fest celebrates innovation, experimentation, and the joy of discovery. Open to playwrights throughout the region, the festival invites writers to create 10-minute plays that align with our mission.
The festival’s two-session format creates a unique mentorship model, where teen and early-career playwrights present their work in the afternoon, receiving feedback from industry professionals. The winner advances to an evening session to learn from and compete with working playwrights for top festival honors.
A New Commission
Thrown Stone has awarded its 2026 commission to Dana Schwartz for her proposed play, Gentlemen Hosts. This is Thrown Stone’s third full-length commission, following Seven Cousins for a Horse by Tammy Ryan (2023) and Show Me the Gates of Heaven by Ramón Esquivel (2025). Connecticut audiences will remember Schwartz from last year’s CT Short Play Festival, where her play The April & Mr. Bigglesworth Super Special Fun-Time Show, a puppet show about gaslighting, grown-up friendship, and the complicated math of who owes whom, was a festival selection.
The Waterfall at the New Harmony Project
The Waterfall was selected as a New Harmony Project Production in Residence ahead of its premiere, giving Ms. Pharel a full development residency with a creative team before the play reached New York.
Two Thrown Stone playwrights at the O’Neill
May 2025. Phanésia Pharel and Tony Meneses were both selected for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, one of the country’s most competitive new play development programs.
Both were produced by Thrown Stone in 2021, when we commissioned three short site-specific plays for The Suburbs and performed them outdoors across Ridgefield.
Meneses developed The Myth of the Two Marcos, about two boys in 1997 Albuquerque who share a name, a comic shop, and little else. Pharel developed Dead Girl’s Quinceañera, a comic thriller about secrets, sisterhood, and solving crime.
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