Set an alert for when Archduke tickets go on sale with TodayTix to see Rajiv Joseph's newest play, a rip-roading dark comedy. Archduke plays in Manhattan for a limited run at the award-winning Roundabout Theatre Company during its 2025/26 season at its Laura Pels Theatre. Patrick Page (the Tony Award nominee famous for originating the role of Hades in Hadestown) stars in this new play directed by Tony Award winner Darko Tresnjak (A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder).
Archduke in New York takes audiences back to 1914 Serbia. The country is destitute, and young Gavrilo Princip has TB. With his country in shambles and his sickness a death sentence, what does Gavrilo have to lose? As such, he's easily lured by promise...and a sandwich. See Archduke off Broadway to see how the events play out: you think you know how World War I began, but perhaps there was more insanity, and humor, than you first imagined.
By: Rajiv Joseph
Director: Darko Tresnjak
Producer: Roundabout Theatre Company
Cast list: Patrick Page
Rajiv Joseph is a Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist for Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and an Obie Award winner for Describe the Night. Known for his singular world view, his writing is sharp and wry, as further evidenced in his newest dark comedy. While Archduke may sound like a historical drama, it is actually something funnier and sneakier: an examination of men who, when down on their luck, will fall into vulnerable traps to grasp for power.
Such is the story of Gavrilo Princip, a teenager of diminishing health in a diminishing country. Meeting a depraved Captain who sends the boys on a mission, Gavrilo believes his duty will restore order and justice to his struggling nation and avenge the unfairness of his terminal illness. The assignment? Assassinate the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Crafting a historical comedy that is actually a present-day allegory, Joseph asks: what happens when a person feels like they have nothing left to lose? What methods are acceptable in the fight against oppression?
Archduke is about the events leading up to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, igniting World War I, but this is no stuffy historical drama: instead, Rajiv Joseph is interested in the comedy of men who are easily influenced and how, despite their powerlessness, they shape global events.
Archduke is at New York's The Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, which is located at 111 West 46th Street, New York, 10036.
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