[In 2013, Academy Award-winning film actor Tom Hanks (1994, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Philadelphia; 1995, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Forrest Gump) made his Broadway début in the limited run of the Broadway show Lucky Guy, Nora Ephron’s last play. (Ephron died on 26 June 2012; rehearsals for the production began on 14 January 2013, 6½ months later. Hanks had also starred in two films written by Ephron, Sleepless in Seattle in 1993 and You’ve Got Mail from 1998; Hanks costarred in 2017’s The Post, which director Steven Spielberg dedicated to Ephron’s memory.)
[Lucky Guy ran at the Broadhurst Theatre from 1 April to 3 July 2013 (with two extensions from 16 June and 30 June), a total of 33 previews and 104 regular performances. It was Hanks’s last New York stage appearance (though his last stage performance was as Falstaff in Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles’s 2018 Henry IV). Hanks (b. 1956) took home a Theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway or Off-Broadway Debut Performance for Lucky Guy.
[In May 2023, the renowned actor published a novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (Alfred A. Knopf). It’s “about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film . . . and the humble comic books that inspired it.” It became a New York Times Bestseller and was recognized by National Public Radio as one of the “Best Books of the Year” for 2023. The Library Journal put the book on its “Lead Holds” list, indicating significant reader demand. (See “Tom Hanks, Novelist“ [22 May 2023].)
[Before the novel, Hanks published Uncommon Type (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), a collection of short stories inspired by his vintage typewriter collection. The stories are linked by a common theme: each involves a typewriter in some way. They aren’t about the typewriters themselves, but about something that might have been written on them. Uncommon Type was a national bestseller and included in USA Today’s 10 Best Books, NPR Best Books of 2017, and Barnes & Noble Best Fiction of 2017.
[Now, based on the stories from Uncommon Type, Hanks has written a play (in which he also stars). This World of Tomorrow was coauthored by Hanks and playwright, adapter, director, and theater teacher James Glossman and directed by Tony Award-winner Kenny Leon (Best Direction of a Play for A Raisin in the Sun, 2014, and multiple nominations). The play had a limited Off-Broadway run in the Kenneth C. Griffin Theater at The Shed in Hudson Yards, a real estate development on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan (over a functioning rail yard); it started previews on 30 October 2025, and opened on 18 November with a closing date of 21 December.
[The story of This World follows Bert Allenberry (Hanks), a scientist from the year 2089. Disenchanted with his high-tech future, he uses a portal to travel back repeatedly, on a quest for true love, to 8 June 1939, to the site of the New York World’s Fair in Corona Park, Queens, where he falls in love with a bookkeeper named Carmen (Kelli O’Hara).
[If anyone thinks that it’s no coincidence that Hanks and Glossman’s play is entitled This World of Tomorrow and is plotted around repeated visits to the 1939 World’s Fair, whose official theme and motto was “The World of the Future,” you’d be absolutely right! Here’s what Hanks, himself, said in Vogue that makes this clear:
“I’ve always had a fascination for the 1939 World’s Fair because it was so blatant for its optimism,” Hanks reflected. “It was called The World of Tomorrow, and it was viewed that all humans would have a common future—a shared one of opportunity, growth, and possibility powered by the four freedoms that everybody in the world was entitled to” (Paul Chi, “Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, and More Helped to Fête Tom Hanks’s Return to the Stage in This World of Tomorrow,” Vogue 19 November 2025).
[(Sidebar: The “Four Freedoms” invoked by Hanks may refer to the celebrated set of fundamental human objectives articulated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt [1882-1945; 32nd President of the United States: 1933-45] in his 6 January 1941 State of the Union address, but the 1939 World’s Fair celebrated a slightly different set of Four Freedoms: Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, and Freedom of Assembly.
[[Conceived by the Fair’s Board of Design, the idea to promote the liberties enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was prompted by the United States Constitution Sesquicentennial, a nationwide commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the creation, ratification, and implementation of the United States Constitution, 1937-39. The notion was championed by New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia [1882-1947; 99th Mayor of New York City: 1934-46].).
[(The fair opened on 30 April 1939, the 150th anniversary of the first inauguration—in New York City, then the nation’s capital—of George Washington [1732/O.S.: 1731-1799; President of the United States: 1789-97], the first chief executive under the newly-ratified Constitution. President Roosevelt gave the opening address that day, noting in his speech the First Amendment’s freedoms, clearly having taken notice of the Four Freedoms sculptures by Leo Friedlander [1888-1966], which La Guardia had dubbed “the heart of the fair,” across the Court of Peace from the speaker’s rostrum.
[(Roosevelt surely saw the Fair’s successful use of the Four Freedoms terminology and was doubtlessly inspired to repurpose the phrase to transform the Fair’s celebration of domestic American democratic values into a global manifesto of universal rights for people “everywhere in the world.”
[(Two years later, in what became known as the “Four Freedoms speech,” the Four Freedoms FDR enumerated, symbolizing America’s ideals, became: Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.
[(Delivered 11 months before the United States entered World War II, the speech provided a moral justification for American intervention and a vision for a post-war world order. The Four Freedoms became a foundational cornerstone for the United Nations (established in 1945) and were enshrined in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948.)
[This first installment of the two-part post primarily consists of articles, all from the New York Times, about Hanks’s composition of the script (as described by himself) and his participation in the production, but in Part 2, to be published on Saturday, 3 January 2026, I will post excerpts from Stephen Colbert’s interview with Tom Hanks on The Late Show of 4 November and a selection of reviews of the performance.]
“TOM HANKS PLANS
TO STAR
IN A NEW PLAY THAT HE WROTE”
by Michael Paulson
[This short notice in the New York Times on 22 May 2025 (Section C [“Arts”]) was an early announcement of Hanks’s plans to stage a play he’d written on a New York stage. It was posted on the paper’s website as “Tom Hanks Wrote a Play, and Will Star in It Off Broadway This Fall“ on 21 May.]
The work is scheduled to run for eight weeks at the Shed in Manhattan.
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 [it turned out to be 11], 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 [a] 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.”
[Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Duce (‘leader’) of the Fascist Party, was appointed prime minister of Italy in 1922; António Salazar (1889-1970) became prime minister of Portugal, a quasi-fascist dictatorship, in 1932; Hitler (1889-1945), Führer (‘leader’) of the Nazi Party, was elected chancellor [prime minister] of Germany in 1933; Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Caudillo (‘leader’) of the Falangist Party, became prime minister of Spain in 1936.
[Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) officially became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922 and de facto leader of the USSR by 1929 by consolidating power after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924. He held the post of Premier from 1941, ruling as a dictator until his death.
[In Japan, a powerful military faction gained control as early as 1931, promoting aggressive expansionism in Asia. The military seized control of foreign policy, leading to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. General Hideki Tojo (1884-1948) was vice-minister of the army from 1938 to 1940 and then minister until 1944 and was a leading advocate for the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. As Prime Minister (1941-44), Tojo consolidated immense power, at times holding multiple ministry positions, creating a virtual military dictatorship. He was responsible for the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into World War II.
[Tojo’s leadership was characterized by a commitment to aggressive territorial expansion to secure vital resources for the Japanese Empire. As PM, he created a one-party system, ending democratic political processes and his control over the levers of state power, he suppressed dissent and oversaw the indoctrination of Japanese youth with extreme militaristic and ultranationalist values.]
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.”
[Sleep No More ran at the McKittrick Hotel in New York from 7 March 2011 to 29 September 2024. It was an immersive theater work created by the British troupe Punchdrunk. It was based primarily on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (from which the title is drawn), with additional inspiration taken from noir films (especially those of Alfred Hitchcock) and the 1697 Paisley witch trials, an incident in Britain that resembles the Salem, Massachusetts, occurrence of 1693.
[(The six-story McKittrick was a performance venue themed as a 1930s hotel in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, built in 1939 and used as an industrial warehouse (which also occasionally housed popular nightclubs in the late 1990s and early 2000s). The building was given a fictional name (taken from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo) and past as a hotel that was shut down six weeks before it was scheduled to open. It was transformed into the immersive theater space for Sleep No More and reopened in 2011 and closed in 2025, a week after Sleep No More closed.
[(The former “McKittrick Hotel” has hosted several major events and creative takeovers throughout the year since it closed as a performance and nightclub space, including hosting a limited engagement for a new immersive production from Artemis is Burning titled The Death of Rasputin (Governors Island: (17 April-29 June 2025; former McKittrick Hotel: 31 October-1 November 2025); the building is also scheduled to host a major New Year’s Eve celebration on 31 December.)
[The audience for Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which can be categorized as immersive theater, promenade theater, and environmental theater wandered at their own pace throughout a set populated by actors. It was not interactive theater because the presence of the audience rarely had any bearing on the story or the performers. The production won the 2011 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience and special citations at the 2011 Obie Awards for design and choreography.]
[Since April 2015, Michael Paulson has been the theater reporter of the New York Times. From 2000 to 2010, Paulson covered religion for the Boston Globe, where he was part of the Globe team whose coverage of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Since 2010, he’s worked at the New York Times, where he initially continued his religion coverage. His work at the Times reflected his early politics roots and continued to tie religion to national issues. Paulson has covered theater at the New York Times.]
* *
* *
“DAZZLING OPENING
NIGHT WITH TOM HANKS”
by Sarah Bahr
[The second New York Times report on Tom Hanks and James Glossman’s play covered the night of the play’s official opening performance. It ran in the print edition of 23 November 2025 in the “Sunday Styles” section, but online, as “A New York Night Out With Tom Hanks,” it was posted on 19 November, the day after the opening.]
Stars flocked to celebrate the actor’s Off Broadway show, ‘This World of Tomorrow.’
On Tuesday evening [18 November], more than 400 actors, directors and designers circulated under soft purple lighting inside the Shed, a performing arts center in Midtown Manhattan, to toast Tom Hanks and his new Off Broadway show, This World of Tomorrow.
“It’s the greatest thrill of my life,” Mr. Hanks, the 69-year-old veteran film star, said of performing in the play, which tells the story of a scientist from the future (played by Mr. Hanks) who travels back in time — to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens — in search of love.
It was opening night for the production, based on Mr. Hanks’s 2017 short story collection, “Uncommon Type,” which was adapted for the stage with the playwright and director James Glossman. It is directed by Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for “A Raisin in the Sun.”
And fellow stars, who entered alongside enormous projections of Mr. Hanks’s likeness, turned out. The illustrious crowd included the actors Meryl Streep, Martin Short and Steve Martin as well as the recently retired [on 22 October 2025] ballerina Misty Copeland.
“I’m a huge ‘Toy Story’ fan, so I’m excited to see him,” Ms. Copeland said of Mr. Hanks, who voiced the cowboy Woody in the “Toy Story” films and who is a two-time Oscar winner (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”). Mr. Hanks has one Broadway credit, “Lucky Guy,” a 2013 newsroom drama for which he received a Tony Award nomination.
[Hanks was in four Toy Story films, all produced by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures: 1995, 1999, 2010, and 2019. Toy Story 5 is due to be released on 19 June 2026, also produced by Pixar and Disney.]
The evening, which doubled as the Shed’s annual fund-raising gala and raised $2.1 million for the organization, honored one of its founding board members, Lew Frankfort, a former chief executive of Coach [Coach New York; American company specializing in luxury accessories such as handbags].
It began with a cocktail reception, where guests — who included Ms. Copeland, a board member of the organization, and Mr. Hanks’s wife, Rita Wilson — munched on chips and nuts before sitting down to a dinner of curated small plates like quail eggs, sweet potatoes and cocoa-braised short ribs.
Around 8 p.m., guests filtered into the Griffin Theater for the evening’s performance. For about the next two hours, Mr. Hanks and his co-star, the Tony Award-winning stage actress Kelli O’Hara, who plays his love interest, gallivanted around a World’s Fair set that included projections of the fair’s General Motors Futurama exhibit and the illuminated water fountains in the Lagoon of Nations.
After the show, attendees were welcomed back to the world of today with hot dogs and ice cream bars, featuring some decidedly 21st-century trappings, including cilantro and an apple cider sorbet.
[Sarah Bahr is an editor on the New York Times’s Flexible Editing desk and covers culture and style for the paper, writing about theater, film, TV, music, visual art, pop culture, parties, and nightlife. She earned a master’s degree in English from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She worked for the Times as a multiplatform editing intern in Summer 2019, and has contributed to USA Today, Forbes Travel Guide, The Indianapolis Star, and Indianapolis Monthly. She’s thrilled to return to New York, where in 2019 she saw 30 shows on and off Broadway in just 10 weeks.]
* *
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“WRITING A PLAY IS
ELECTRIFYING (AND TERRIFYING)”
by Tom Hanks
[Hanks’s own account of his first experience as a dramatist was published in the New York Times of 15 December 2025 (Section C [“Arts”]). Online, the article was posted as “Tom Hanks on the Electrifying (and Terrifying) Experience of Writing a Play“ on 14 December.]
Tom Hanks looks back on the process of creating This World of Tomorrow with James Glossman.
At the very first rehearsal of the new Off Broadway play This World of Tomorrow our director, Kenny Leon, stopped us after two minutes — two minutes. “I don’t want to hear how you are saying the lines,” he told us actors. “I want to hear what you are saying.”
We may have been focused on our dialects, but he was listening for the language of the play. And that language? It had evolved from prose on the page, my prose.
The play was based on a collection of short stories I’d written, and now my words were being spoken by the members of our all-star cast, including Kelli O’Hara, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Jay O. Sanders. I was not only acting along side them, but I was also responsible for what was coming out of their mouths. Would my words inspire them? Would they help my castmates convey the language Kenny was listening for?
In our rehearsal room, the rewriting never ended. The script that my collaborator, the playwright James Glossman, and I had pored over for months now sounded completely different coming from the cast. It was a little surreal to hear Ruben as a tech genius from the future explaining the perils of time travel or Kelli as a bookkeeper from the Bronx telling the story of her magical day at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Both sounded just as we had imagined but also completely different as we went from table reads to rewrites to rehearsals and more rewrites before finally freezing the script.
These words have been with me for over a decade. My stories were published in 2017 in a collection titled “Uncommon Type.” Then, over the past three-and-a half years, in the form of a script adapted from two of these stories. I’m no stranger to commitment. I’ve devoted months of my life to working on films and, back in 2013, the Broadway play “Lucky Guy.” But this would be different; this was years.
After quieting some internal doubts, I embarked on this endeavor, partly fueled by a desire to bring to life onstage a sense of lives caught between the certainties of the past and the unknowable future. I wanted theatergoers to ponder the possibilities of each present moment.
It all started during the Covid shutdown, when Jim presented a staged reading of my work at a fund-raiser for Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, N.Y. (Though we had never met, Jim and I had traveled in concentric theater circles in the 1970s and ‘80s.) His reading combined two stories from my book: “The Past Is Important to Us,” about a tech titan of the future who takes a sort of time travel vacation to 1939, and “Go See Costas,” inspired by my father-in-law’s escape from the Communists in postwar Bulgaria and his arrival in New York City.
[Though regions varied with respect to the imposition and withdrawal of closures due to the COVID pandemic, most areas of the U.S. issued shutdown orders in March 2020. In New York, the most restrictive closures began on 22 March. The order was lifted statewide on 15 June 2021.]
Jim thought the stories could work as pieces of theater: Two men leaving their pasts behind them, starting new lives in a new world and being changed by what they find in pre- and post-World War II America. I saw no reason to deny Jim that challenge.
What he called “Safe Home” evolved from a one-time reading into a full production at Shadowland. Opening night was in July 2022 [15 July-7 August], and I was rather thrilled by the production — though the play was crammed to the rafters with ideas and plot, and burdened with dialogue, monologues and explanations.
Still, given our overlapping pasts and affection for the prose of the short stories, we felt a desire to revisit the work. But where to begin — again? Jim and I exchanged pages for two years, rewriting each other, struggling to produce coherent dialogue, debating phrases and scenes. This is a science fiction story, but even we realized we were really pushing the logic of the science, the reasoning, the physics.
Then at an invaluable weeklong workshop in 2024 at Portland Stage in Maine, it became clear that James and I needed to work together in person in order to wrestle the play into shape. We settled on my agent’s offices in the Chrysler Building in Manhattan. Would it be the crucible of creativity we needed?
[The Portland Stage workshop was part of the troupe’s annual Little Festival of the Unexpected (21 May-6 June 2024). Performances of See You Tomorrow, the new title of the play that would become This World of Tomorrow, were offered on 12 and 14 June.]
We revisited our research about the 1939 World’s Fair, and kept landing on a didactic bit of narration: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future . . . [,]” This came from the designer Norman Bel Geddes’s “Futurama,” a vast design for a future world, presented by General Motors in what was the fair’s most popular attraction.
We forged ahead, developing back stories for each character, figuring out which speeches resonated, and testing the number of jokes audiences would tolerate. We wanted to get the era right. One character played by Sanders owns a Greek diner just off Sheridan Square [heart of Greenwich Village]; another, Carmen Perry (O’Hara), works at a handbag factory, and lives with her brother’s family in the Bronx. Virginia, Carmen’s niece (Kayli Carter), is the president of her school’s radio club and obsessed with the advent of television. I portray a wealthy tech entrepreneur from 2089 who meets these characters when he travels back in time.
Sometime in the summer of 2024, we let some trusted minds read the latest rendering of our work. Debating innocuous wording was slightly excruciating (Do audiences respond better to “we have a situation” or “we have a problem”?), but the reactions landed like a gut punch: “Interesting!” “Huh?” “You might have something here.” Translation: There is more work to be done.
Somehow the manuscript made its way to Alex Poots and Laura Aswad at the Shed, who offered an official workshop — a staged reading. Jim and I gulped at the reality of what this deep throw would mean, then thought ‘Well, yeah, why not?’ We slapped the date on our calendars and rushed headlong into more revisions.
Now, how is this for timing? The reading of This World of Tomorrow was held at the Shed the day after the 2024 presidential election [5 November]. Just as we were taking an audience back to 1939 — which held its own uncertainty around war and the financial rebound from the Great Depression [1929-39] — there was a looming uncertainty, in 2024, of what the next four years would mean for the United States. Then came the realities of our endeavor: constructive criticism of what remained cloudy in the play’s narrative, theme and language.
As Jim and I dove back into the script, we were guided by notes from Alex and Todd Kreidler, the dramaturg and associate director; the reactions of the folks who attended the workshops; and friends who had read (and reread) it. Despite the work to be done, the Shed offered this fall for a production. Jim and I agreed to take the leap.
As rehearsals began at Gibney Center downtown [a dance venue with two facilities: Lower Manhattan and Union Square], missing beats were revealed. More revisions were made. The writing felt endless. New pages greeted the team each morning. Oftentimes the actors’ work the day before informed these new passages, their stone-cold authority illuminating moments that needed adjustments. Kenny kept stopping us, wanting to hear what the play was saying, in the language of the theater.
Previews arrived, and I eventually surrendered all but my actor hat. Jim and I handed over the final script to the cast to perform.
It’s electrifying to be a playwright — as terrifying a creative experience as I’ve ever had. It has also been a pleasure and an honor to join a cast and crew with such dedication, joy and brass. Some days, amid the rush of performing for a live audience, I feel as if our reality is forcing us to engage with the play’s themes: Staying present by embracing the moment, while also hurrying toward our inevitable future — the play’s final performance on Dec. 21.
[These three articles on This World of Tomorrow by Tom Hanks and James Glossman cover the announcement of the play’s arrival in New York City, the opening performance, and coauthor Hanks’s discussion of his inaugural experience as a writer of plays.
[The second installment of “Tom Hanks, Playwright” will include excepts from the transcript of Hanks’s 4 November 2025 guest shot on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It’ll be posted on Sunday, 4 January, and I hope all ROTters will come back to read it. Hanks is always an affable and amusing talk show guest, and this was no exception (though I have excerpted only the parts of the show in which the celebrity talks about the play).
[Part 2 will also include reviews of the Off-Broadway première of This World of Tomorrow.]
