By SHARON EBERSON
In September of 2025, in the lobby of City Theatre, Artistic Director Clare Drobot and Managing Director James McNeel sat down to talk about expectations for 2026.
The South Side company had “already exceeded our subscription goal from last season, which I think is really exciting, knowing that we’re building on something,” Drobot said at the time, while noting that the first preview of the season-opening Another Kind of Silence, a rolling premiere production, had sold out.
“We’re continuing to rebuild audiences post-pandemic,” she said, “and the response to this season, writ large, has just been incredibly positive.”
City Theatre entered the new year with more positivity, led by the unprecedented success of Laura Gunderson‘s Little Women adaptation, which eclipsed box-office sales records that date back to 2006, and set records for the 51-year-old company.
The kickoff to 2026 is a third straight new play co-production, with the unwieldy but descriptive title Malcolm X & Redd Foxx Washing Dishes at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in Harlem. The two-hander comes to Pittsburgh via TheatreSquared of Fayetteville, Arkansas, and moves on to Virginia and Dallas from here.
Based on real-life Americans whose legacies loom larger than life, the play by James Norton is directed by TheatreSquared’s Dexter J. Singleton, who has previously directed for Pittsburgh Public Theater, and who was the dramaturg on City’s co-production of Fat Ham.
“Our directing teams this year, four out of the six … are local to Pittsburgh, which I think has been really meaningful,” Drobot said. “Getting to work with Robert [Ramirez of Carnegie Mellon] on Hedwig and Kaja Dunn [also of CMU, on Little Women] is really beautiful, to now have these sort local and national partnerships around plays that just continue to expand. And Dexter, who’s directing Malcolm X, worked here as the dramaturg on Fat Ham, so all of these connections are kind of coming full circle and doing this really holistic vision of how we produce, to involve and deeply connect with the Pittsburgh artistic community.”
Malcolm X & Redd Foxx, which had a reading in New York City before its first full production in Arkansas in October, was named among 42 “Plays and Musicals to See in the U.S. This Fall” by The New York Times.
Malcolm X and Redd were friends and roommates in Harlem during the early 1940s, before their lives took divergent turns. Malcolm Little and John Elroy Sanford did, indeed, work at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in Harlem, and, according to biographical reports, their nicknames at the time, owing to similar complexions and hair color, were “Detroit Red” (Malcolm X) and “Chicago Red” (Foxx).
In the play, Edwin Green portrays “Foxy,” and Trey Smith-Mills, “Little.”
In his autobiography, Malcolm X referred to his friend and literal partner in petty crimes as “the funniest dishwasher on this Earth.”
Playwright Norton, winner of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists’ M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for Mississippi Godddamn, told the Fayetteville Flyer that, initially, his commission was to be about Malcom X’s friendship with Maya Angelou. He was re-reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as research when he discovered the other relationship that “leapt off the page” and became the play’s subject.
While the initial run was enjoying an extended run at TheaterSquared, The Unforgettable Line, a blog “Serving the New York City Theater-Going Community,” noted, “While familiarity with the raunchy comedian and the inspirational Muslim leader is helpful, at heart Jonathan Norton has here written a thoughtful exploration of friendship. … By turns, they build each other up and tear each other down, eventually bringing out something special in one another that perhaps no one else would unearth. Always running in the background is the pre-civil-rights society that literally and metaphorically deprives the two of the music in life.”
Drobot explained how co-productions such as Malcolm X & Redd Foxx have been a game-changer for regional companies whose mission, like City’s, is “to provide an artistic home for the development and production of contemporary plays that engage and challenge a diverse audience.”
Every company would like to claim ownership of a “world premiere” as it promotes new work, but the consensus has shifted to co-ownership.
The rolling world premiere, modeled by the National New Play Network (NNPN), of which City is a member, most often allows more than one company to produce the same new play in unique productions, within a relatively short timeframe.
“NNPN really is on the forefront of saying ‘new plays matter regionally,’ right?,” Drobot explained. “It’s not just work that is produced in New York and Los Angeles and disseminated around the country, but it’s actually work that is produced in communities that are telling the stories that need to be heard.”
The five works of City Theatre’s 2025-2026 season, which includes Hedwig and the Angry Inch as its first-ever revival, bucks the trend of financially strapped companies pulling back on the number of offerings per season.
“What I love about our season, and I think this is something that City tries to do, is, let’s say, Another Kind of Silence isn’t for you. Well, there’s Little Women. There’s Eureka Day. There’s Malcolm X & Redd Foxx Washing Dishes in Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in Harlem. And while I think the plays are absolutely in conversation with one another, these are plays about people finding their voice, about these deeply human stories of how we connect, and who we connect with, and how we define community.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
🎟️ The rolling world premiere of Malcolm X & Redd Foxx Washing Dishes at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in Harlem is on City Theatre’s Main Stage, 1300 Bingham Street, South Side, through February 8, 2026. Tickets: https://citytheatrecompany.org/production/100835/list_performances or call 412-431-2489.
📖 Momentum Reading: Jo Van Gogh, written by Kate Isabel Foley and directed by Aurelia Clunie, at City’s Lillie Theatre, Sunday, January 25, 2026. at 5 p.m. RSVP at https://citytheatrecompany.org/production/103903/momentum-jo-van-gogh.
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