Evan Cabnet has been an artistic director since 2016. Having come up in theater as a director, he first led LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s programming initiative to produce new artists. As of September 2024, Cabnet has taken over as artistic director of Second Stage from founding artistic director Carole Rothman. (The 2025-2026 season is the first Cabnet has programmed.) But no matter the institution, there are three questions at the top of his mind: “What makes us special? What makes us excellent? And I think almost, most important, what makes us different?”
“There are a lot of wonderful not-for-profits in the city that are making incredible work at a really high level. How are we different from one another?” Cabnet continued. “That’s the thing I think about all the time.”
When it comes to Second Stage, part of its distinction lies in the origin of its name. “The original mission as Carole Rothman and Robyn Goodman wrote it was about second stagings of shows that — for whatever reason — didn’t get the world premiere that perhaps they deserved or wanted,” Cabnet said. “The root of that mission is critical in 2026, because now there’s a different problem, which is that we’ve lived through this explosion of world premieres, new play development centers, robust commissioning programs, play festivals. And so we’ve come — over the last maybe 20, 30 years — through this golden age of American playwriting, and what happens is we’re churning out masterpieces faster than we can appreciate them.”
Much of Cabnet’s debut season returns to the company’s founding principle. Jordan Harrison’s “Marjorie Prime,” which made its Broadway debut at the Hayes Theatre on Dec. 8, 2025, first premiered in 2014 at the Mark Taper Forum before transferring Off-Broadway in 2015. Its initial run was five weeks (then nine weeks in New York); its Broadway run was 12 in a much bigger house on a more prominent stage. Second Stage’s upcoming Main Stem production of “Becky Shaw” at the Hayes comes after the play first bowed with the company Off-Broadway in 2008 and was named a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist. (It’s the first time Second Stage will revive one of its own original premieres.)
“When I think about what makes Second Stage different or potentially different,” Cabnet told Broadway News, “I think about how we can go back a bit and say, ‘No, this is a major American play. This is important. This needs to be part of the conversation, part of the canon.’”
Cabnet said these revivals will take place on and Off-Broadway “because not every play should be a Broadway play,” he noted. The artistic director intends to balance revivals with new work — the development of which has always been a passion of his.
