Daniel Kaluuya will make his U.S. stage debut in Grass, a new play from two-time Tony winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, world premiering Off-Broadway at Park Avenue Armory. Previews begin February 19, with opening night set for February 26 and the run continuing through March 28.
Kaluuya plays a son who embarks on a surreal, sprawling road trip through the American South with his mother as they attempt to reconstruct their family tree, encountering historical and allegorical figures along the way. The play is described in press materials as “equal parts fantasia, memory play, and morality play,” examining the limits of personal, ancestral, and national identity amid social upheaval. Grass is co-commissioned with the National Black Theatre and was written specifically for the Armory’s 55,000-square-foot stage. Sarah Benson directs, with set design by Mimi Lien, reuniting both collaborators with Jacobs-Jenkins following his 2014 play An Octoroon.
Jacobs-Jenkins has built one of the most decorated recent runs in American theater, winning the 2025 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Purpose, and a Tony for best revival of a play for Appropriate the year before. Kaluuya, an Oscar, BAFTA, and Golden Globe winner for Judas and the Black Messiah, broke out with his Oscar-nominated performance in Get Out and has since appeared in Black Panther, Widows, Nope, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Chris Rock’s Misty Green. His stage work to date has been confined to London, including Olivier-nominated turns in Oxford Street and Sucker Punch.
Pairing one of Jacobs-Jenkins’s most acclaimed recent collaborators behind the scenes with an actor making his first American stage appearance signals how deliberately this production has been assembled, built around proven creative partnerships rather than simply capitalizing on Kaluuya’s name recognition for a splashy debut. The production arrives as part of Park Avenue Armory’s 2027 season marking its 20th anniversary, which also includes the North American premiere of a reimagined Einstein on the Beach and the North American premiere of Guernica Guernica from Belgian theater collective FC Bergman.