Nashville Repertory Theatre and Tailgate Brewery have partnered to create a brand new beer called the New Play IPA in anticipation of the Ingram New Works Festival in May 2019. A Milkshake IPA, the beer will be on tap in all three Tailgate locations and other select bars in Nashville beginning in early April.
Staff of Nashville Repertory Theatre including Nate Eppler, Playwright in Residence and Director of the Ingram New Works Project, and Drew Ogle, Managing Director, reported to Tailgate’s Headquarters early Wednesday morning to partake in the brewing process. After their initial brew day on March 13, the IPA will go through a few more transformations over the next couple of weeks before it is ready to be packaged, tapped, and consumed all over Nashville!
Nashville Rep’s Ingram New Works Project is a nationally recognized program that develops emerging voices for the American stage by hosting 4 playwrights in residence annually to develop new plays. This year’s playwrights are Lindsay Joelle, Dean Poynor, Riti Sachdeva, and R. Eric Thomas, who have spent all year working with Eppler to write, workshop, and edit their new plays. They were joined in January by this year’s Playwright Fellow, Sarah Ruhl, who led a REPaloud staged reading of her play the Clean House and acted as a mentor during the January playwright lab.
Joelle, Poynor, Sachdeva, and Thomas will get to taste their New Play IPA in April when they visit Nashville again for their final Ingram New Works lab. The year-long project will culminate with the Ingram New Works Festival in May where all five new plays written in Nashville will be premiered in staged readings. Tailgate favorites will be available at the festival in May!
Now in its 10th year, the program has helped to change the landscape of American theatre. Of dozens of plays created at Nashville Rep, 28 have gone on to full productions nationally, including to Broadway, off-Broadway, and the NYC Fringe Festival. More than half of those have won major awards.
The Rep’s partnership with Tailgate Brewery was born of the desire to enhance Festival offerings while raising awareness with target audiences prior to the Festival. The Ingram New Works Brew will be tapped in all three Nashville-area Tailgate Brewery locations in early April, and Tailgate will be the exclusive beer sponsor for the New Works Festival May 8-18, 2019.