By Joseph Haj, Producing
Artistic Director
 |
| Joseph Haj |
We are excited to open the Mainstage Season with the brilliant
new comedy by Christopher Durang, Vanya
and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Three siblings collide. Vanya and Sonia, who
have spent their lives caring for the estate of their late parents, and movie
star sister Masha who comes swanning back in true Chekhovian fashion. If you enjoy
Chekhov, you’ll love it. If you hate Chekhov, you’ll love it even more. And if
you don’t know a thing about Chekhov, nothing bad happens...it’s a hysterical
ride.
Then our rotating repertory moves from the metaphor of the
sea in The Tempest and Metamorphoses to that of the forest with
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.
Characters enter the woods pursuing their ambitions—and reckon with forces they
never imagined and beyond their control in magical and dangerous circumstances,
before coming out of the forest forever changed.
Midsummer, one
of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies, is the theatre’s first “fairy tale”
following lovers who escape to the woods and encounter a Faerie King and Queen,
in a tale rich in music, magic and comedy. Sondheim’s musical masterpiece Into the Woods brilliantly imagines the
lives of classic fairytale characters – Cinderella, Rapunzel, witches and giants
– reminding us we need to be careful what we wish for. Performing them in
rotation, sharing a scenic world, allows us to explore two plays, written 400
years apart, that use the forest as metaphor in similar ways, describing how we
sometimes need to get lost in order to find ourselves.
Then we turn to Alice Childress’ Trouble in Mind. Written in 1955, it’s the story of a racially mixed
cast rehearsing a new play with hopes of taking it to Broadway. Misperceptions
and stereotypes abound as a veteran African American actress grapples with choosing
between her chance to play the lead in a Broadway show, and the cost of
compromising her principles. Crackling with the wit and daring of Clybourne Park, Trouble in Mind is an ‘edge of your seat’ comedy that asks hard
questions and offers no easy answers.
Next, a classic from two master playwrights. Arthur Miller’s
adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of
the People. It’s bracing, electric and incredibly current. Set in a
small Norwegian town where the town leaders have invested a significant amount
of money developing public baths in hopes of drawing tourists to the area, a
doctor discovers the waters of the baths have been contaminated by textile
mills further up the river, and must be shut down. Expecting
to be hailed as a hero, instead he and his family are ostracized for
threatening the town’s economic viability. This play, originally penned in the
1880s by Ibsen, and re-told in the 1950s by Arthur Miller, still rings true
today. 2015 is the centennial of Miller’s birth, so this production celebrates
one of our major American playwrights with one of his rarely seen works.
And we’ll close our Mainstage Season
with the Pulitzer Prize-nominated 4000
Miles. When 21 year-old Leo suffers a major loss, he seeks solace with his
feisty 91 year-old grandmother. They infuriate, bewilder, and ultimately reach
each other in this unsentimental look at the funny, frustrating, life-changing
relationship between a grandson facing the rest of his life and a grandmother
slowly forgetting hers. A keenly observed look at the sort of inter-generational
relationship we rarely see onstage.
See you in September for this exciting
season!
Joe Haj
Joe Haj
