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actutrends · 5 years ago

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How Warren bulldozed Hillary on the economy

After the conference, Warren sent out Clinton a list of people she wanted the project group to speak with on financial policy in order to widen their horizons beyond individuals like Robert Rubin and Michael Froman, high-ranking authorities in the Costs Clinton and Obama administrations who had likewise operated at Citigroup.

The list, recompiled by POLITICO based on the accounts of those involved, included a collection of sometimes unknown liberal academics and economic experts consisting of MIT’s Simon Johnson, UConn’s James Kwak, Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, Vanderbilt’s Ganesh Sitaraman (policy director for Warren’s 2012 project), University of Chicago’s Amir Sufi, U.C. Irvine’s Katie Porter and Vermont Law School’s Jennifer Taub.

The typical thread amongst the majority of the names: They had been critical of the Obama administration’s reaction to the monetary crisis, as Warren had.

That list, the contents of which have not been previously reported, was just the beginning of an extensive two-year project by Warren, her staff and outside allies to press, prod and shape the prospective Clinton administration– an effort that also included a casual blacklist of Clinton allies that Warren and outdoors partners would withstand if nominated for jobs in the Clinton administration, that included BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

The continuous interference in some cases frustrated and irritated the former secretary of State and her group.

” It was type of an annoyance to be considering her all the time,” remembered one Clinton transition official.

However Clinton’s team listened– knowledgeable about both Warren’s trustworthiness among progressives and her desire to utilize her bully pulpit to condemn members of her own celebration. Much more acutely, they felt the ever-present hazard that she ‘d toss her own hat into the ring.

” I believe if the outreach hadn’t been done then she may have felt obliged to run,” a Clinton authorities explained of their technique.

Warren’s initial list in 2014 and the taking place impact campaign over administration personnel, according to interviews with more than 20 people associated with the procedure, provides the clearest possible window into how Warren would staff her own administration– and just how dramatically a Warren administration’s financial group would leave from current Democratic administrations and those of her rivals such as former Vice President Joe Biden.

The two-year project to mold the would-be Hillary Clinton administration is also a case research study in Warren’s theory of power, an approach her aides and allies sometimes describe as the “inside-outside video game”– integrating difficult, frequently hyperbolic rhetoric to produce take advantage of with quieter, hands-on, person-to-person outreach.

As the Clinton transition group fielded concepts from senators in the last months of the campaign, Warren was dealt with as a “first amongst equates to,” according to a Clinton transition official. Warren’s chief of staff Dan Geldon and Clinton senior staffer Jake Sullivan were in close contact and satisfied consistently in the last months of the campaign. Warren was deep in the weeds on workers and pressed the Clinton transition group to employ her allies like Rohit Chopra, a veteran of the Consumer Financial Security Bureau.

With her mantra of “workers is policy,” she lobbied on the odd but crucial shift “landing groups” for economic policy– assisting install people on her list like Johnson and Porter to top positions. Clinton transition aides remember Bharat Ramamurti, a top Warren policy assistant now on her governmental project, periodically dropped into the workplace.

Warren likewise personally and persistently lobbied project chairman John Podesta, members of the transition group and Clinton herself. When Warren went to the project’s Brooklyn headquarters shortly after backing Clinton in 2016, she demanded a separate meeting with the campaign’s policy group.

” There were the do’s and the don’t’s– do [hire] this person and do not with this individual,” recalled Podesta of their conversations in the fall of2016 “She was more fired up about the do not’s than the do’s.” Podesta would not name names however said: “If you operated at the Obama Treasury Department or the SEC then you were most likely in difficulty.”

Before becoming Facebook COO, Sandberg had been Summers’ chief of staff when he was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration.

” She wasn’t making recs on who the secretary of Defense must be,” Podesta included. “It was all concentrated on Treasury, monetary regulators which cluster of agencies.”

” She was the pushiest and most engaged outside individual that I can believe of in terms of telling us to work with individuals, pressing us to work with individuals,” one Clinton shift authorities said.

Warren 2016?

Clinton’s group was best to think that Warren was reevaluating a 2016 run. As “Draft Warren” efforts ended up being louder and more organized in late 2014 and early 2015, Warren openly brushed them off however independently asked her other half, Bruce Mann, what he thought.

Mann gave a careful spousal reply: “I desire you to do whatever you want to do,” Warren recalled in her 2017 book “This Battle Is Our Fight.” When she pushed him, he was apathetic. “But a race like this one looks pretty dreadful,” he informed her. “The Senate thing was bad enough, and running for president would be worse– a lot even worse.”

She asked whether he would be OK if she decided to run. Her decision not to run prompted sighs of relief on Clinton’s group, some of whom think Warren could have beaten them by marshaling a wider union than that ultimately put together by Sen. Bernie Sanders.

” We were stressed,” a Clinton project authorities stated. “In retrospect, she could have been a quite powerful candidate in the main.” Her choice also led Sanders to make a run of his own from Clinton’s left which would end up being more formidable than Warren, Clinton, and even Sanders himself expected.

Warren didn’t want to be out of the game entirely. If she wasn’t going to run, Warren set her mind on a different sort of project to push Clinton towards her sphere of progressive policy wonks.

The List

In early 2015, Clinton’s group still was not taking any chances. After Warren sent her lengthy list to the previous secretary of State, Clinton dispatched senior aide and speechwriter Dan Schwerin to review the names with Geldon, then Warren’s chief of personnel and now a senior consultant on her governmental run.

They fulfilled in early January for almost an hour and a half. Afterward, Schwerin reported back that Warren’s group “seem cautious– and quite persuaded that the Rubin folks have the inside track with us whether we recognize it yet or not– but open to engagement and to be shown incorrect,” according to emails later published by WikiLeaks, a cyberattack that American intelligence later on concluded became part of a Russian project to hurt Clinton’s opportunities in2016

Schwerin included that Geldon “laid out an in-depth case versus the Bob Rubin school of Democratic policymakers, was very crucial of the Obama administration’s options.”

The exact same week Schwerin satisfied Geldon, Warren coupled the personal push with a public speech at the AFL-CIO that prompted Democrats not to take victory laps since the gross domestic product and joblessness numbers looked excellent.

The speech raised eyebrows amongst Clinton allies such as Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who emailed leading Clinton assistant Cheryl Mills that “we need to craft the financial message for Hillary so that Warren’s common inaccurate conclusions are dealt with.”

It was the first of numerous instances of Warren putting public pressure on the Clinton team while working her relationships on the inside, sometimes to the Clinton group’s disappointment.

” Warren clearly was getting information about what was happening inside,” recalled one transition authorities. “We ‘d have some internal conversation and then Warren would say something to reporters– shooting little warning shots.”

To the surprise of some in Warren’s orbit, Clinton’s group began proactively interesting with the people on Warren’s list– and not just in a check-the-box fashion, according to some who were called.

In numerous ways, the list was a collection of progressives who shared Warren’s conviction that the Obama administration had bungled the healing by being too near to banks and thinking about shorter-term repairs instead of using the opportunity to enact a structural overhaul of the government’s role in the economy. They tended to be sharply important of Obama’s Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, who was viewed as near Wall Street.

” She didn’t wish to see an administration that was fully staffed by deputy secretaries-in-waiting from Brookings,” stated Georgetown Law teacher Adam Levitin, a previous student of Warren’s who remains close to her, describing the center-left think tank with ties to organisations.

Sheila Bair had had several showdowns with Geithner while she ran the FDIC throughout the crisis.

In pushing for her allies to be integrated into Clinton’s campaign, Warren began hitting the phones– reaching out to people like Gary Gensler, Mandy Grunwald and the few other links she had to Clinton.

Gensler, who had worked for Clinton in 2008 and had actually been a Warren ally throughout the monetary crisis, was tapped to be Clinton’s chief monetary officer for the 2016 campaign and would end up being a main point individual to handle the Warren-Clinton relationship– dubbed by Sullivan as the “Elizabeth whisperer.”

Their contact was nearly constant, to the point that some Clinton assistants questioned whose side he was on.

” It looked like every meeting he ‘d say, ‘I just talked with Elizabeth and …'” recalled one campaign authorities with an eye roll.

The Bernie Aspect

As Sanders’ campaign took off in early 2016, Warren felt pressure building from both Sanders and Clinton to back.

Ideologically, she was much closer to the Vermont senator. There was uncertainty within Warren’s orbit that he could in fact pull it off and that backing him would reduce her capability to influence Clinton.

At a personal hangar at Dulles International Airport, Sanders took a mobile phone and paced around privately while talking to Warren, remembers one aide. Some Sanders senior staffers were delighted she had actually stayed neutral while others felt victory would be in sight if Warren would throw her weight behind the senator.

From the other side, Podesta repeatedly called and advised Warren to back Clinton to help bring the main fight to an earlier end.

One former Clinton adviser defined Warren’s relocations as part of a larger method to prevent pushing away the left while likewise keeping her relationships with the Clinton group that she thought was likely to win: “She remained neutral, but she made sure she had impact with the candidate so she and her advisers had a seat at the table in a genuine method.”

Election Night 2016

Warren was preparing a caution shot for President-elect Clinton.

Warren’s group had currently arranged for her to provide a prominent speech that Thursday early morning at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. The address would lay out what Warren thought the concerns must be for the brand-new White Home, according to a Warren ally familiar with the speech, in an attempt to pressure the shift group from the start.

She wasn’t going to mince words. The two-year project to affect the Clinton administration was lastly about to flourish. A minimum of three individuals on Warren’s 2014 list– Simon Johnson, Katie Porter and Elise Bean– had actually been slated for leading positions on obscure however consequential transition “landing groups” that would help staff the administration, according to one transition authorities.

The Warren-allied Roosevelt Institute– a leftist competitor to the Center for American Development– had recognized over 150 economic policy tasks and interviewed over 1,000 possible prospects for them ahead of the Clinton shift. Other progressive allies of Warren were preparing blacklists of individuals to prevent.

However as many political leaders carried out in November 2016, Warren needed to scrap her scheduled remarks. “That speech was now in the garbage,” she later wrote.

The speech she really provided echoed what she had informed Clinton at that December 2014 meeting. “If we have found out nothing else from the previous two years of electioneering, we need to hear the message loud and clear that the American people desire Washington to change,” she said.

It was not long after that she and her team started making preparations for a 2020 run. The final decision wasn’t made but the team began taking the required actions, basically turning her 2018 Senate reelection into a dry run, stockpiling over $10 million in cash for excellent measure.

Ganesh Sitaraman has actually been one of the key architects of Warren’s countless plans. Porter ran for Congress herself, won, and is now one of the three-co-chairs for Warren’s project. Heather McGhee and Demos have actually provided much of the plan for how Warren integrates economic and racial justice in an effort to broaden her base. While he is not included in the campaign, his hard critiques of effective technology companies like Facebook echo Warren’s. And Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO remains in the background as an important booster for Warren amongst union authorities. It’s uncertain how many of them would stock a would-be Warren administration however their impact would be undeniable.

Even if she does not become the nominee, individuals close to her say she will be simply as tough and exasperating a presence on any other transition group.

In some ways, her speech at the AFL-CIO was the first of her governmental campaign.

” The fact is that individuals are best to be angry.”

The post How Warren bulldozed Hillary on the economy appeared first on Actu Trends.

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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How Warren bulldozed Hillary on the economy

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-warren-bulldozed-hillary-on-the-economy/

How Warren bulldozed Hillary on the economy

After the meeting, Warren sent Clinton a list of people she wanted the campaign team to consult on economic policy in order to broaden their horizons beyond people like Robert Rubin and Michael Froman, high-ranking officials in the Clinton and Obama administrations who had also worked at Citigroup.

The list, recompiled by POLITICO based on the accounts of those involved, included a hodgepodge of sometimes obscure liberal academics and economists including MIT’s Simon Johnson, UConn’s James Kwak, Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, Vanderbilt’s Ganesh Sitaraman (policy director for Warren’s 2012 campaign), University of Chicago’s Amir Sufi, U.C. Irvine’s Katie Porter, and Vermont Law School’s Jennifer Taub. The progressive think-tank typesincluded Demos’ Heather McGhee; public servants who had clashed with the Obama administration included former FDIC chair Sheila Bair and longtime Senate aide Elise Bean. AFL-CIO policy director Damon Silvers represented unions.

The common thread among most of the names: They had been critical of the Obama administration’s response to the financial crisis, as Warren had.

That list, the contents of which have not been previously reported, was just the beginning of an intensive two-year campaign by Warren, her staff, and outside allies to push, prod, and shape the would-be Clinton administration — an effort that also included an informal blacklist of Clinton allies that Warren and outside partners would resist if nominated for jobs in the Clinton administration, which included BlackRock chairman Larry Fink and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The constant interference sometimes frustrated and annoyed the former secretary of state and her team.

“It was kind of a pain in the ass to be thinking about her all the time,” recalled one Clinton transition official.

But Clinton’s team listened – aware of both Warren’s credibility among progressives and her willingness to use her bully pulpit to condemn members of her own party. Even more acutely, they felt the ever-present threat that she’d throw her own hat into the ring.

“I think if the outreach hadn’t been done then she might have felt obligated to run,” a Clinton official explained of their approach.

Warren’s initial list in 2014 and the ensuing influence campaign over administration personnel, according to interviews with more than 20 people involved in the process, offers the clearest possible window into how Warren would staff her own administration – and just how sharply a Warren administration’s economic team would depart from recent Democratic administrations and those of her rivals such as former Vice President Joe Biden.

The two-year campaign to mold the would-be Hillary Clinton administration is also a case study in Warren’s theory of power, an approach her aides and allies sometimes refer to as the “inside-outside game” – combining tough, often hyperbolic rhetoric to create leverage with quieter, hands-on, person-to-person outreach.

As the Clinton transition team fielded ideas from senators in the final months of the campaign, Warren was treated as a “first among equals,” according to a Clinton transition official. Warren’s chief of staff Dan Geldon and Clinton senior staffer Jake Sullivan were in close contact and met repeatedly in the final months of the campaign. Warren was deep in the weeds on personnel and pushed the Clinton transition team to hire her allies like Rohit Chopra, a veteran of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

With her mantra of “personnel is policy,” she lobbied on the obscure but important transition “landing teams” for economic policy — helping installpeople on her list like Johnson and Porterto top positions. Clinton transition aides remember Bharat Ramamurti, a top Warren policy aide now on her presidential campaign, occasionally dropped into the office.

Warren also personally and persistently lobbied campaign chairman John Podesta, members of the transition team, and Clinton herself. When Warren visited the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters shortly after endorsing Clinton in 2016, she insisted on a separate meeting with the campaign’s policy team.

“There were the ‘do’s and the ‘don’t’s — do [hire] this person and don’t with this person,” recalled Podesta of their conversations in the fall of 2016. “She was more fired up about the ‘don’t’s than the ‘do’s.’” Podesta wouldn’t name names but said: “If you worked at the Obama Treasury Department or the SEC then you were probably in trouble.”

Or as one transition official half-jokingly described the “don’t” personnel: “Anyone who’s ever talked to Larry Summers.” Before becoming Facebook COO, Sandberg had been Summers’ chief of staff when he was treasury secretary during the Clinton administration. He had been her thesis adviser at Harvard as well.

“She wasn’t making recs on who the secretary of defense should be,” Podesta added. “It was all concentrated on Treasury, financial regulators, and that cluster of agencies.”

“She was the pushiest and most engaged outside person that I can think of in terms of telling us to hire people, pushing us to hire people,” said one Clinton transition official. “We didn’t necessarily have the same priorities. After all, she wasn’t going to be president. Hillary Clinton was going to be president.”

Warren 2016?

Clinton’s team was right to think that Warren was reconsidering a 2016 run. As “Draft Warren” efforts became louder and more organized in late 2014 and early 2015, Warren publicly brushed them off but privately asked her husband, Bruce Mann, what he thought.

Mann gave a careful spousal reply: “I want you to do whatever you want to do,” Warren recalled in her 2017 book “This Fight is Our Fight.” When she pressed him, he was unenthusiastic. “But a race like this one looks pretty terrible,” he told her. “The Senate thing was bad enough, and running for president would be worse — a lot worse.”

She asked if he would be okayif she decidedto run. He said yes but she wrote that she didn’t believe him. Her decision not to run prompted sighs of relief on Clinton’s team, some of whom believe Warren could have beaten them by marshaling a broader coalition than that eventually put together by Bernie Sanders.

“We were worried,” a Clinton campaign official said. “In retrospect, she could have been a pretty potent candidate in the primary.” Her decision also led Sen. Bernie Sanders to make a run of his own from Clinton’s left which would become more formidable than Warren, Clinton, or even Sanders himself expected.

Warren didn’t want to be out of the game entirely, however. If she wasn’t going to run, Warren set her mind on a different sort of campaign to push Clinton toward her sphere of progressive policy wonks.

The List

In early 2015, Clinton’s team still was not taking any chances. After Warren sent her lengthy list to the former secretary of state, Clinton dispatched senior aide and speechwriter Dan Schwerin to go over the names with Geldon, then Warren’s chief of staff and now a senior adviser on her presidential run.

They met in early January for nearly an hour and a half. Afterward, Schwerin reported back that Warren’s team “seem wary — and pretty convinced that the Rubin folks have the inside track with us whether we realize it yet or not — but open to engagement and to be proven wrong,” according to emails later published by WikiLeaks, a cyberattack which American intelligence later concluded was part of a Russian campaign to hurt Clinton’s chances in 2016.

Schwerin added that Geldon “laid out a detailed case against the Bob Rubin school of Democratic policy makers, was very critical of the Obama administration’s choices.”

The same week Schwerin met Geldon, Warren coupled the private push with a public speech at the AFL-CIO that urged Democrats not to take victory laps because the GDP and unemployment numbers looked good. “Despite these cheery numbers, America’s middle class is in deep trouble,” she declared. “All of the new money earned in this economy over the past generation—all that growth in the GDP—went to the top.”

The speech raised eyebrows among Clinton allies such as Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who emailed top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills that “we need to craft the economic message for Hillary so that Warren’s common inaccurate conclusions are addressed.”

It was the first of many instances of Warren putting public pressure on the Clinton team while working her relationships on the inside, at times to the Clinton team’s frustration.

“Warren clearly was getting info about what was happening inside,” recalled one transition official. “We’d have some internal conversation and then Warren would say something to reporters — firing little warning shots.”

To the surprise of some in Warren’s orbit, Clinton’s team began proactively engaging with the people on Warren’s list — and not just in a check-the-box fashion, according to some who were contacted.

In various ways, the list was a collection of progressives who shared Warren’s conviction that the Obama administration had bungled the recovery by being too close to banks and thinking about shorter-term fixes rather than using the opportunity to enact a structural overhaul of the government’s role in the economy. They tended to be sharply critical of Obama’s Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, who was perceived as close to Wall Street.

“She didn’t want to see an administration that was fully staffed by deputy secretaries-in-waiting from Brookings,” said Georgetown Law professor Adam Levitin, a former student of Warren’s who remains close to her, referring to the center-left think tank with ties to businesses.

Simon Johnson wrote in 2011 that Geithner’s vision for the economy was “deeply disturbing” and “amounts to a huge, uninformed gamble with the future of the American economy.” Mian co-authored the book “House of Debt” in 2014 that argued banks and creditors had too much power over policy-making. Taub similarly argued that the housing crisis was metastisizing in her book “Other People’s Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business.” Bair had had several showdowns with Geithner while she ran the FDIC during the crisis.

In pushing for her allies to be incorporated into Clinton’s campaign, Warren began hitting the phones — reaching out to people like Gary Gensler, Mandy Grunwald, and the few other links she had to Clinton.

Gensler, who had worked for Clinton in 2008 and had been a Warren ally during the financial crisis, was tapped to be Clinton’s chief financial officer for the 2016 campaign and would become a central point person to manage the Warren-Clinton relationship — dubbed by Sullivan as the “Elizabeth whisperer.”

Their contact was nearly constant, to the point that some Clinton aides wondered whose side he was on.

“It seemed like every meeting he’d say ‘I just talked to Elizabeth and. . .,’” recalled one campaign official with an eye roll.

The Bernie Factor

As Sanders’s campaign took off in early 2016, Warren felt pressure building from both Sanders and Clinton to endorse.

Ideologically, she was much closer to the Vermont senator. But there was skepticism within Warren’s orbit that he could actually pull it off and that endorsing him would diminish her ability to influence Clinton.

Sanders, who is usually reluctant to ask for endorsements or get immersed in transactional politics, did make a personal hard sell in early 2016 as the primary raged on. At a private hangar at Dulles airport, Sanders took a cell phone and paced around privately while talking to Warren, remembers one aide. Some Sanders senior stafferswere thrilled she had stayed neutral while others felt victory would be in sight if Warren would throw her weight behind the senator. At the end of the long conversation, Warren still declined to endorse Sanders.

From the other side, Podesta repeatedly called and urged Warren to endorse Clinton to help bring the primary fight to an earlier end. “I think her view was that if she was respectful and waited that she’d be more useful in bringing Bernie supporters to Hillary,” Podesta remembered. “I always thought that was overthinking it.”

One former Clinton adviser characterized Warren’s moves as part of a larger strategy to avoid alienating the left while also maintaining her relationships with the Clinton team that she thought was likely to win: “She stayed neutral, but she made sure she had influence with the nominee so she and her advisers had a seat at the table in a real way.”

Election Night 2016

Warren was preparing a warning shot for President-elect Clinton.

It was Tuesday, November 8, 2016. Warren’s team had already arranged for her to give a high-profile speech that Thursday morning at the AFL-CIO in Washington, DC. The address would lay out what Warren believed the priorities should be for the new White House, according to a Warren ally familiar with the speech, in an attempt to pressure the transition team from the beginning.

She wasn’t going to mince words. The two-year campaign to influence the Clinton administration was finally about the bear fruit. At least three people on Warren’s 2014 list — Simon Johnson, Katie Porter, and Elise Bean — had been slated for top positions on little-known but consequential transition “landing teams” that would help staff the administration, according to one transition official.

The Warren-allied Roosevelt Institute — a leftist rival to the Center for American Progress — had identified over 150 economic policy jobs and interviewed over 1,000 potential candidates for them ahead of the Clinton transition. Other progressive allies of Warren were preparing blacklists of people to avoid.

But as many politicians did in November 2016, Warren had to scrap her planned remarks. “That speech was now in the trash,” she later wrote.

The speech she actually delivered echoed what she had told Clinton at that December 2014 meeting. “If we have learned nothing else from the past two years of electioneering, we should hear the message loud and clear that the American people want Washington to change,” she said. “It was clear in the Democratic primaries. It was clear in the Republican primaries. It was clear in the campaign and it was clear on Election Day.”

It was not long after that she and her team began making preparations for a 2020 run. The final decision wasn’t made but the team began taking the necessary steps, essentially turning her 2018 Senate re-election into a dry run, stockpiling over $10 million in cash for good measure.

When she did make the leap into the presidential fray on New Years’ Eve, the last day of 2018, she began tapping into the same list of people she gave Clinton four years before. Many of them have been cited in her many plans. Sitaraman has been one of the key architects of Warren’s innumerable plans. She used Johnson as a validator for her math on Medicare for All. Porter ran for Congress herself, won, and is now one of the three-co-chairs for Warren’s campaign. McGhee and Demos have provided much of the blueprint for how Warren combines economic and racial justice in an effort to expand her base. Bair, a George W. Bush appointee, has been an outside validator for her agenda.

Chopra is now an FTC commissioner. While he is not involved in the campaign, his tough critiques of powerful technology companies like Facebook echo Warren’s own. And Silvers remains in the background as an important booster for Warren among union officials. And the Roosevelt Institute continues to build its own list of progressive personnel. It’s unclear how many of them would stock a would-be Warren administration but their influence would be undeniable.

Even if she doesn’t become the nominee, people close to her say she will be just tough and exasperating a presence on any other transition team.

In some ways, her speech at the AFL-CIO was the first of her presidential campaign. She argued that the2016 results proved the points she’d been making the last two decades. “The final results may have divided us — but the entire electorate embraced deep, fundamental reform of our economic system and our political system,” she said.

“The truth is that people are right to be angry.”

#economy #Foreign #Hillary #Politics

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newyorktheater · 7 years ago

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Off-Broadway in the Fall promises a homoerotic dystopia (A Clockwork Orange); a revival of Harvey Fierstein’s breakthrough play starring Michael Urie (Torch Song); bio-dramas about a transgender etiquette teacher (Charm) and Public Theater founder Joe Papp (Illyria.) There are hip makeovers of Shakespeare, Sophocles and Jane Austen; an immersive visit to a Korean pop music factory by the same theater that developed The Great Comet; and plays by Julia Cho, Caryl Churchill, Amy Herzog,Rajiv Joseph, Sarah Ruhl, Simon Stephens, John Patrick Stanley, Anna Ziegler (two!), and Stephen Adly Guirgis (three!)

Jonno Davies in A Clockwork Orange

Kpop

Chloe Sevigny in Downtown Race Riot

The Wolves

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks

Michael Urie and Harvey Fierstein

Playwright Sarah Ruhl

Playwright Stephen Adly Gurigis

Shakespeare

Jane Austen

Playwright Anna Ziegler

Joe Papp, subject of Illyria

Unlike Broadway (See my Broadway 2017-2018 Preview Guide), Off-Broadway is full of theaters/theater companies that present whole seasons of original or originally interpreted work. That’s why my Off-Broadway preview below largely groups shows according to the theaters that are producing them, most of which offer subscriptions and/or memberships. I list the theaters in order of my preference for them (determined by such factors as their recent track record, the promise of the new season, and by my overall experience interacting with them as theatergoer and as critic.)

I’ve put a red check mark — √ — besides a handful of shows opening in the Fall about which I’m especially excited, or intrigued, or at least notably hopeful.

(The asterisk *, explained more fully at the bottom, indicates those theatrical empires that have both Broadway and Off Broadway venues.)

PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS

416 W. 42nd St. Twitter: @PHNYC

Annie Baker’s “The Flick” is one of six plays that originated at Playwrights Horizons that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The theater offers new plays and musicals that are consistently worthwhile, in an environment that feels dedicated both to the theater artists and the theatergoers.

For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday

August 18, 2017 – October 01, 2017 Opens September 12.

A play by Sarah Ruhl: “Playing Peter Pan at her hometown children’s theater is one of Ann’s fondest, most formative memories. Now, 50 years later, Neverland calls again, casting her and her siblings back to this faraway dreamscape where the refusal to grow up confronts the inevitability of growing old.”

The Treasurer

September 06, 2017 – October 22, 2017

A play by Max Posner, directed by David Cromer: “Ida Armstrong is broke, lonely, and fading fast. And she’s spending all of her children’s money, forcing her son to assume the unwanted role of The Treasurer: an arrangement that becomes untenable the more he questions his devotion to her.”

THE PUBLIC THEATER

425 Lafayette Street and in Central Park. Twitter: @PublicTheaterNY

Having originated both Hamilton and Fun Home, the Public is on a roll, the latest of many in the successful downtown empire that Joe Papp created half a century ago. (One of the plays this season is about Papp!) The Public is so popular these days that members have been complaining that their membership doesn’t guarantee tickets to the Public shows they want to see.

Public Works’ As You Like It

September 2 – September 5.

It’s now a Labor Day weekend tradition, to stage a Shakespeare play as a spectacular employing some 200 professional and amateur actors at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Shaina Taub has composed the songs for this musical version of Shakespeare’s tale “of faithful friends, feuding families and lovers in disguise.”

Measure for Measure

September 17 – November 5, 2017

The innovative avant-garde theater company Elevator Repair Service adapts Shakespeare’s play about “impossible moral choices in 17th century Vienna” using athletic theatricality and Marx-Brothers-inspired slapstick.

Tiny Beautiful Things

Strayed/Vardalos

September 19 to November 12.

Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) plays Sugar, an anonymous online advice columnist in a Vardalos’ stage adaptation of the book of the same name by Cheryl Strayed. Directed by Thomas Kail (Hamilton.) This an encore presentation. My review of the play when it was presented last year.

Oedipus El Rey

October 3 to November 19. Opens October 24.

Playwright Luis Alfaro has set this Greek tragedy in South Central LA and recast the hero as “a troubled Latino whose dreams of controlling his own destiny soar above the barbed wire of the prison where he’s spent his life.”

Office Hour

October 17 – December 3, 2017

Julia Cho’s new play about a teacher who compels her 18-year-old student to attend her office hours to discuss his violently obscene work.”The isolated young student in her office has learned one thing above all else: that for the powerless, the ability to terrify others is powerful indeed.”

√ Illyria

October 22 – November 26

Richard Nelson (the Apple Family plays and the Gabriels) directs his play about the 1958 fight by Public Theater founder Joseph Papp over free Shakespeare productions in Central Park.

The Winter’s Tale

November 26 – December 17

The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit production of Shakespeare’s play, directed by Lee Sunday Evans

NEW YORK THEATER WORKSHOP

79 East 4th Street. Twitter: @NYTW79

NYTW got much attention two years ago for presenting David Bowie’s musical “Lazarus,” and last year for its “Othello” with movie stars Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo. Its fare has ranged from the innovative and tuneful — “Hadestown” — to the cutting edge and incomprehensible — “Fondly, Collette Richland”

Mary Jane

Amy Herzog, Anne Kauffman

September 6, 2017—October 15, 2017

Written by Amy Herzog and directed by Anne Kauffman. “During a rain-drenched summer in New York City, an indefatigable single mother navigates the mundane, shattering and sublime aspects of caring for a chronically sick child.” Stars Carrie Coon.

Hundred Days

November 15, 2017—December 31, 2017

A musical about having only 100 days to live.

Three exciting-sounding new plays for which NYTW has not provided the dates as of yet:

An Ordinary Muslim, by Hammaad Chaudry, directed by Jo Bonney

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Rachel Chavkin

The House That Will Not Stand by Marcus Gardley, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

SIGNATURE

480 West 42nd Street. Twitter: @signaturetheatr

As the first New York theater to win the Regional Tony Award, the Signature now has some solid proof of what has been clear to its patrons for years. What has distinguished this theater is not only its track record, but its commitment to keep the price of all tickets for initial runs to $30.

With the recent expansion of both their facilities and their mission, some longtime subscribers have had to adjust to the introduction of work by more untested playwrights. This is the second season under new artistic director Paige Evans, who headed Lincoln Center’s LCT3. Signature’s founding artistic director James Houghton died in August, 2016. This season looks more exciting in the Spring.

The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A

August 22 – October 1, 2017

Suzan Lori Park’s first of two plays based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Christine Lahti portrays an abortionist trying to free her son from prison

The Red Letter Plays: In The Blood

August 29 – October 8, 2017

Hester La Negrita is a penniless mother of five condemned by the men who love her.

Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train

October 3 – November 12

The first of this season’s plays at the Signature by Stephen Adly Guirgis: “Angel Cruz is a 30-year-old bicycle messenger awaiting trial for the death of the leader of a religious cult. Inside Rikers Island, a terrified Angel is befriended by a charismatic serial killer named Lucius Jenkins. Lucius has found God.” Directed by Mark Brokaw.

Spring:

Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story

Paradise Blue by Dominique Morisseau

Our Lady of 121st Street by Stephen Adly Guirgis

A new play by Stephen Adly Guirgis

ATLANTIC THEATER

On The Shore of the Wide World

August 23 – October 8, 2017

A play by Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) about nine months that changed the lives of a family.

Describe The Night

November 10 – December 24

Set in Russia over the course of 90 years, Rajiv Joseph’s new play traces the stories of seven men and women connected by history, myth and conspiracy theories.

PRIMARY STAGES

The theater company takes up residence this season at the Cherry Lane in the West Village

The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord

September 19 – October 22, 2017

Three historical figures who wrote their own version of the gospels debate religion, literature and marriage.

Pride and Prejudice

Kate Hamill and Mark Bedard in Pride and Prejudice at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, which is co-producing its transfer to Primary Stages.

November 7 – December 15, 2017

Kate Hamill (Bedlam’s Sense and Sensibility) adapts and stars in this playful adaptation of Jane Austen’s tale of outspoken Elizabeth Bennet and the aloof Mr. Darcy.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER*

@LCTheater

The shows at Lincoln Center’s Off-Broadway venues are inexpensive (especially at the Claire Tow theater, where initial-run tickets cost $20) and often rewarding.

After The Blast

October 7 to November 19. Opens October 23.

A play by Zoe Kazan “set in the wake of total environmental disaster, when the human population has retreated underground”

The Wolves

November 1 to January 7, 2018. Opens November 20.

Sarah DeLappe’s play about a teenager girls soccer team is being encored in a new venue. My old review of The Wolves.

ROUNDABOUT* LAURA PELS

The empire that is now Roundabout includes three Broadway theaters, and that’s where most of the attention is focused, mostly on star-studded revivals, especially musicals. But its fourth building houses two Off-Broadway theaters (one of them a tiny “Black Box” theater.) It is in its Off-Broadway facility that Stephen Karam’s The Humans originated, which went on to Broadway and Tony love. The Roundabout’s “Underground” series discovers new playwriting talent, with tickets priced at $25.

The Last Match

September 28 – December 24, 2017. Opens October 24.

A new play by Anna Ziegler about two tennis greats who are facing off in the match of their lives

Too Heavy for Your Pocket

September 15 – November 19, 2017. Opens October 5.

Jiréh Breon Holder’s play takes place in Nashville in 1961, when 20-year-old Bowzie Brandon gives up a college scholarship to join the Freedom Riders.

MCC THEATER

Address: The Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher Street.

Twitter: @mcctheater

Charm

August 31 – October 8. Opens September 18

A play by Philip Dawkin. “When Mama Darleena Andrews– a 67-year-old, black, transgender woman — takes it upon herself to teach an etiquette class at Chicago’s LGBTQ community center, the idealistic teachings of Emily Post clash with the very real life challenges of identity, poverty and prejudice faced by her students. Inspired by the true story of Miss Gloria Allen

School Girls, Or The African Mean Girls Play

November 2 – December 10

Rebecca Taichman (Tony winner for Indecent) directs Jocelyn Bioh comedy about a fight over the Miss Universe pageant in Ghana’s most exclusive boarding school.

CLASSIC STAGE COMPANY

136 East 13th Street Twitter: @ClassicStage

Its 50th anniversary season is heavy on Shakespeare in the Fall, but in the Spring branches out to Tennessee Williams as well as an original play by Terrence McNally about Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe,and the first major New York revival of Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein’s adaptation of the opera by Bizet with an all African-American cast.

As You Like It

September 13-October 22

Shakespeare’s comedy, with music by Stephen Schwartz, set in the Jazz Age.

The Stowaway

November 5 – 19

This play geared to children is “inspired by the plays and language of Shakespeare.” By Trusty Sidekick Theater Company, which uses puppetry and live music,

Fiasco Theater’s Twelfth Night

November 29-January 6

SECOND STAGE THEATER*

Second Stage will launch its first Broadway season at the Helen Hayes in Spring 2018, the fourth “non-profit” to produce theater both on and Off Broadway. I’m hoping this will encourage them to become literally more inviting to independent New York critics.

√ Torch Song

Michael Urie stars in the play that made its author and first star Harvey Fierstein famous, in a production directed by Moisés Kaufman. “It’s 1979 in New York City and Arnold Beckoff is on a quest for love, purpose and family.”

MTC* At City Center

131 West 55th Street Twitter: @MTC_NYC

The theater has recovered from the public criticism of a couple of seasons ago that it lacks diversity in its offerings, but this “club” is still not especially welcoming to non-subscribers or independent professional critics.

The Portuguese Kid

September 19 – November 26. Opens October 24.

John Patrick Shanley directs his new romantic comedy about a habitually widowed woman (Sherie Rene Scott) who pays a visit to her second-rate lawyer (Jason Alexander), intending to settle her latest husband’s affairs.

Actually

October 31 – December 3

Anna Ziegler (Photograph 51) explores the issue of consent on campus. “At a raucous party during their freshman year at Princeton, Tom and Amber connect in ways that seem innocent enough at first. But as things progress, they find themselves in murky territory.”

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS

√ KPOP (Ars Nova)

September 5 – October 7, 2017

The world-conquering success of Korean pop music is the subject of this new immersive theatre piece in the theater that developed “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.” The show, about a new record label on the eve of its launch, is put together by the theater companies Ma-Yi and the Woodshed Collective, the latter of which did an amazing show called Empire Travel Agency, a kind of on-the-town spy-murder mystery.

√ A Clockwork Orange (New World Stages)

September 2 – January 6, 2018. Opens September 25

A stage adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel, best-known for the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film, about a teenage hoodlum in the near future who is arrested, and brainwashed to be submissive by the authorities.

Downtown Race Riot (The New Group)

Chloe Sevigny stars in In Seth Zvi Rosenfeld’s play as a strung-out, free-wheeling single mom whose son Pnut and his Haitian best friend Massive wrestle with their obligation to join rioters in Washington Square Park in 1976 attacking any people of color they can find.

Other companies worth checking out:

St Ann’s Warehouse

Rattlesticks Playwright Theater

Mint Theater

Mayi Theater Company

There are also commercial shows put together by independent producers that appear in theaters for rent, such as:

Cherry Lane Theatre Daryl Roth Theatre Gym at Judson Lucille Lortel Theatre New World Stages Orpheum Theater The Players Theatre Snapple Theater Center Theatre Row – The Acorn Union Square Theater Westside Theatre

*THE ASTERISK: Off-Broadway AND Broadway

*Just to complicate matters, several of the resident theaters also present shows on Broadway – Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theater Company (MTC), the Roundabout Theater Company., and starting this season, Second Stage Theatre, which has bought the Helen Hayes. Their Broadway offerings are listed in my Broadway 2017-2018 Preview Guide.

What Is Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway?

Off-Broadway theaters, by definition, have anywhere from 99 to 499 seats. If a theater has more seats than that, it’s a Broadway house. If it has fewer, it’s Off-Off Broadway.

There are some terrific Off-Off Broadway theaters, sometimes confused for Off-Broadway. These include (but are not limited to) The Flea, Labyrinth Theater, and LaMaMa ETC.

Monthly Calendar of Openings

Because there are so many shows Off-Off Broadway, and their runs are so limited, I include them in my monthly theater preview calendar (along with Broadway and Off Broadway openings) posted near the beginning of each month.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For more information about Off-Broadway, go to The League of Off-Broadway Theatres and Producers (aka The Off-Broadway League). This should not be confused with the Off-Broadway Alliance, which is a separate organization (though they should probably merge, no?)

What’s Off-Broadway Dough? Does that mean there’s not much of it? pic.twitter.com/KHH1kApUzb

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) September 4, 2016

Off Broadway Fall 2017 Guide Off-Broadway in the Fall promises a homoerotic dystopia (A Clockwork Orange); a revival of Harvey Fierstein's breakthrough play starring Michael Urie (Torch Song); bio-dramas about a transgender etiquette teacher (Charm) and Public Theater founder Joe Papp (Illyria.) There are hip makeovers of Shakespeare, Sophocles and Jane Austen; an immersive visit to a Korean pop music factory by the same theater that developed The Great Comet; and plays by Julia Cho, Caryl Churchill, Amy Herzog,Rajiv Joseph, Sarah Ruhl, Simon Stephens, John Patrick Stanley, Anna Ziegler (two!), and Stephen Adly Guirgis (three!)

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