Lena Voronova’s debut season as artistic director at The Seam Theatre does something that off-Broadway programming almost never does: it has a thesis.
The three productions she’s announced this week — “Drift State” by Olu Adeyemi, “The Interpreter” by Camille Fontaine-Brecht, and “Minor Adjustments” by Sasha Ogundimu — share a preoccupation with how form shapes what a story is able to tell. That’s a coherent curatorial vision. It’s also not easy to execute at an 85-seat house with The Seam’s production history.
Voronova was associate artistic director at Compass Theatre for four years before taking this role. What she learned there, apparently, is what she didn’t want. “Drift State,” which opens the season in September, tracks three generations of a Nigerian-American family through a structure Adeyemi has described as refusing linear accumulation — time in the play doesn’t build, it pools. I’ve read an early draft. That description is accurate. It’s working in the lineage of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s approach to inherited form — not what families pass down thematically, but what the play’s grammar knows about inheritance before a word is spoken. Adeyemi has found something new to do inside that tradition.
“The Interpreter,” the second production, is built around a formal device that Fontaine-Brecht calls “functional bilingualism”: English- and French-speaking audience members receive different information at different points in the play, such that neither has the complete picture. That is either a genuine formal breakthrough or a logistical implosion, and I have not yet determined which. Fontaine-Brecht is a rigorous enough playwright that I’m inclined to bet on the former. But this is the production I’ll be watching most closely, and not entirely for good reasons.
The season closes with Ogundimu, whose compressed domestic scenes I’ve caught twice in downtown short-form programs. He writes small rooms that expand when you’re not looking. A full-length commission from Voronova is exactly the kind of institutional support this playwright needs right now.
The limitation: The Seam has not announced any new funding partnerships, and its production history suggests that technically ambitious stagings tend to land softer than planned. If “The Interpreter” requires genuine simultaneous translation infrastructure — and the formal conceit demands it does — I’d like to see a budget line before I start issuing guarantees.
What Voronova is doing here is making a case for what intentional programming looks like at this scale. If she executes it, this season gives downtown theater the aesthetic argument it’s been missing.
Season subscriptions are on sale now. Single tickets for “Drift State” go on sale August 12.
