NEW YORK, July 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Inverse Theater will be launching a five-year nation-wide reading series on July 25. 2026, entitled “The Kirk Wood Bromley Reading Series – Celebrating America’s Greatest Verse Playwright – 20 Plays in 5 Years!” Directors will begin the series by presenting Bromley’s play, The American Revolution, on various dates in 2026 to honor America’s 250th birthday. Then, they’ll present one of Bromley’s other 20 plays each season for the next five years.
New Dramatists alumni Kirk Wood Bromley has been compared to Shakespeare by numerous publications. OffOffOff.com said, “for a taste of what it must have been like to see Shakespeare in his own time, you couldn’t do better than Bromley.” He has been called “the Verse Play Champion” (The Village Voice) and “the Beloved Bard of Downtown Theater” (The New Yorker).
According to Melissa Stuart, Inverse’s Producer, Bromley’s work is especially suited for a reading series. “Inverse was the first NYC company to work with Robert Lopez, the Oscar Award winning composer of Frozen and Book of Mormon, when Robert composed music for The American Revolution. And in Robert’s wonderful words, ‘Kirk’s writing is some of the most interesting stuff in the New York theater. And it’s almost as much fun to read his plays as it is to see them — he’s one of the few playwrights whose work can be considered literature.'”
The first 2026 reading of The American Revolution will be by Social Animal in Raleigh, NC, directed by Joshua Spafford, on July 25. The production will feature James Urbaniak as George Washington, best known for his roles as Rusty Venture in the Venture Brothers and Robert Crumb in American Splendor. Further productions will then follow in NYC (John Gideon, producer), Austin, TX (The Zahir Productions), Columbia, MO (David Crespy, director), and Los Angeles (Alexander Yannis Stephano, director).
“We are still adding to the roster of companies that will be involved,” says Melissa Stuart, “so directors should contact me if they’re interested. This festival will be an amazing chance for new audiences to hear Bromley’s groundbreaking work. And with Bromley himself providing insights for each play and performance documentation being aggregated on social media, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the American theater community to begin the multi-generational task of interpreting this seminal body of dramatic poetry.”
A full series calendar can be found at inversetheater.org.
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SOURCE Inverse Theater Company