Tom Hanks, the acclaimed film actor, has written a new play about love, longing and time-travel, and is planning to star in an Off Broadway production of it this fall.
The play, “This World of Tomorrow,” will be staged in a 550-seat theater at the Shed, a performing arts venue on Manhattan’s Far West Side that has been helping Hanks develop the work over the last year. The play is scheduled to run for just eight weeks, from Oct. 30 to Dec. 21.
“This World of Tomorrow” is about a scientist from the future who travels back in time — to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens — searching for love. It is based on elements of Hanks’s “Uncommon Type,” a collection of short stories published in 2017.
Hanks, who will play the scientist, will lead a cast of 10 to 12 performers, some of whom will take on multiple roles. A two-time Oscar winner (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”), Hanks has one Broadway credit, “Lucky Guy,” a 2013 newsroom drama for which he received Tony Award nomination.
Hanks wrote the new play with James Glossman, a playwright and director with whom he has collaborated on other projects, including “Safe Home,” which had a production in 2022 at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, N.Y. (It was also based on “Uncommon Type” stories.) The director of the new play will be Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed, said Hanks’s team approached him last year when they were looking for a place to develop the show. Poots leapt at the opportunity, he said, thinking “he’s one of the most beloved and trusted storytellers of our time.” Poots called the play “a classic love story,” but also noted that, because parts of it take place in 1939, “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism.”
“This World of Tomorrow” is one of three upcoming theater pieces to be staged at the Shed. It will present, in collaboration with Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse, a revival of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “The Brothers Size,” starring André Holland, from Aug. 30 to Sept. 28. And from June 17 to Oct. 19 it will present “Viola’s Room,” an immersive audio production narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It was created by Punchdrunk, the company behind “Sleep No More.”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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