Wednesday, March 15, 2000
Playhouse announces ambitious new season
Theater wants to become home for major playwrights
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Playhouse in the Park will welcome home Keith (Thunder Knockin' on the Door) Glover as part of its 2000-2001 season. His latest work, Dark Paradise: The Legend of the Five-Pointed Star is the season's Rosenthal New Play Prize winner.
This wild and woolly tale of gun-slinging heroes fighting the Prince of Darkness in the Old West will be staged in the larger Marx Theatre, a first for the prize winner in its 12-year history.
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2000-01 SEASON
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Marx Theatre:
Inherit the Wind, Sept. 5-Oct. 6.
Everything's Ducky, Oct. 17-Nov. 17.
A Christmas Carol, Dec. 1-30.
Dark Paradise, Jan. 28-March 2.
Art, March 18-April 20.
Talley's Folly, April 29-June 1.
Thompson Shelterhouse:
Shakespeare's R&J, Sept. 23-Oct. 22.
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, Nov. 4-Dec. 23.
Closer, Jan. 6-Feb. 4.
Avenue X, Feb. 17-March 18.
The Mystery of Irma Vep, April 7-May 6.
Five-play subscription series start at $124.50. Several discounts are available, including student and educator series. For subscription information and brochures call the Playhouse box office at 421-3888.
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“Home” is the key word for next season on the Marx stage. While the Shelterhouse skews young with some of the hippest work playing in New York and across the United States, the Marx series appears intent on establishing the Playhouse as a home for major emerging and established artists.
Also coming home is Jeffrey Hatcher, 1993 Rosenthal New Play Prize winner for Scotland Road. He'll return as one of the collaborators of Everything's Ducky, a musical comedy based on the fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling.”Its single production in San Francisco earlier this season created so much theater world buzz that it's expected to land on Broadway shortly after its Cincinnati-St. Louis warm-up.
Coming home to the Playhouse for the first time will be playwright Lanford Wilson and longtime collaborator director Marshall Mason. They created a series of 20th century American stage classics over the course of two decades, starting in 1964. Mr. Mason will direct the 20th anniversary production of one of their greatest teamings, delicate romance Talley's Folly, about a Jewish man wooing a WASP spinster in 1940s Missouri.
Playhouse producing artistic director Ed Stern has long said that one of his goals for the Playhouse is to move it from its position high in the second tier of national resident theaters to a place among the nation's acknowledged best. Top-tier theaters are clustered along both coasts and Chicago/Minneapolis.
Mr. Stern resists saying what next season could accomplish. “That's not for me to say. It's for this community and the theater community nationally to decide,” he says. The season, he allows, “does help us to move further along and shows how we differ from everybody else not just nationally but locally.”
Remaining plays on the Marx stage next season: Inherit the Wind, 1998 Best Play Tony Award winner Art, and the popular annual production of A Christmas Carol.
As more and more schools debate replacing Darwinism with Creationism, Inherit the Wind is timely again, almost eight decades after the Scopes “Monkey Trial” that inspired it, Mr. Stern says. “These are issues we thought would be gone by now.”
Playing the titans of the courtroom who battled (literally to the death) in one of the first “trials of the century” will be two Playhouse favorites, Joneal Joplin and Philip Pleasants, on stage together for the first time.
Mr. Hatcher collaborates with the creators of Dreamgirls and Side Show on Everything's Ducky, a wacky, quacky tale set to a pop score. Playhouse and St. Louis will both have a small share in the show for playing a role in its development.
Cowboys and vampires come together for a showdown in fable- and movie-loving Mr. Glover's Dark Paradise. It brings a beautiful heroine, a town sheriff, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday for a ghoulish gunfight that's more High Midnight than High Noon. This is Mr. Glover's second Rosenthal New Play Prize. He won for In Walks Ed in1997.
Art, funny, intelligent play by Yasmina Reza, is about art and friendship. After a rich physician buys a new painting by a hot French artist, the reactions of his friends make for hilarious comedy.
It's been 20 years since that romantic comedy Talley's Folly won the Pulitzer Prize. The play, about a Jewish man wooing a hesitant, WASP spinster on the edge of a lake in 1944 Missouri, has had a healthy life in community theater for years (as has Shelterhouse closer Irma Vep.) Mr. Stern believes both deserve a professional re-visiting.
The Shelterhouse season will offer a double look at Romeo and Juliet with a pair of contemporary, wildly different takes on the classic.
The Shelterhouse season opens with the bold Shakespeare's R&J, with its conceit that four bored prep school boys, with all their teen-age energy, decide to act out the play.
It doesn't take much to trace Avenue X back to the Bard. The a capella musical is set in 1963 Brooklyn where the feuding factions are the Italians of Bensonhurst and the African-Americans of Coney Island housing projects. Gospel, early rock, blues, jazz, folk, doo-wop and more carry the story along.
Playhouse will celebrate the holiday season with the off-Broadway hit I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, all about the mating game.
Patrick Marber's London hit Closer is also about mating, but it's uncompromising in its exploration of love, desire, sex and the life and death of modern relationships.
Charles Ludlam's wild Gothic send-up The Mystery of Irma Vep plays out on a dark and stormy night in a spooky house on the moors. Tongues firmly in cheek, a pair of actors take on all the roles in a frenzy of quick changes.
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