In 1996, Maria Striar and some theater friends from college staged a play in a New York City church. To maximize their allotted month in the space, they extended invitations to fellow working artists and eventually created the Summerworks series that continues today. Clubbed Thumb, as Striar’s company is now known, develops “strange and provocative new plays by living American writers,” and has helped launch the careers of Sarah Ruhl, Sam Hunter, and Pam MacKinnon, among many others.
How did your theater company find its footing? We didn’t have a mission or anything; we were just putting on a play. There was a one-man show, some readings, some nights of improv. Some were the beginnings of relationships we would continue and some of it was pretty haphazard. We invited various people we knew that were working on [projects]. It was very, very bare-bones.
What’s Clubbed Thumb’s mission now? The mission followed when we had a track record—like, “What do we seem to be doing?” We live in a very particular part of the new play theater ecology. We have a particular aesthetic; we are still pretty text-focused, but try to think of text ultimately as something that is a blueprint for
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