Lynn Nottage, Craig Lucas and Jon Robin Baitz are among playwrights on the slate for the upcoming season. Dates and casting have not been announced.
As previously reported on Playbill On-Line, per the PH website, the world premieres of the Wendy MacLeod's Juvenilia (directed by David Petrarca) and the musical, Wilder, will be part of the season, as will the New York premiere of Craig Wright's 9/11-themed work, Recent Tragic Events (directed by Michael John Garcés).
The Wright drama is set on Sept. 12, 2001, during a blind date in Minneapolis between Andrew, a self-effacing and shy young bookstore clerk, and foxy advertising exec Waverly. But the evening is rocked by the information that Waverly's sister has gone missing in New York. Its world premiere was by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC.
Craig Lucas, the author of Prelude to a Kiss, The Dying Gaul and the new musical, Light in the Piazza, will see the world premiere of his play, Small Tragedy (directed by Mark Wing-Davey) at PH. "Backstage and global politics unexpectedly collide when an enterprising Boston director stages his own translation of Oedipus Rex in this timely, multi-layered and powerful new play," according to the season announcement.
The Water Children author MacLeod's Juvenilia is billed this way by PH: "What better way to avoid writing a term paper than by plotting to seduce the wholesome girl across the hall? Add a little tequila and a hellbent It Girl girlfriend, and soon all boundaries are tested. A rivetingly authentic and hilarious examination of how the truth sneaks out when no one's looking." Jon Robin Baitz, who penned Ten Unknowns, The Substance of Fire and Three Hotels, has written the new Chinese Friends, premiering at PH. Robert Egan of Mark Taper Forum directs the play. "A game of cagey one upsmanship ensues when a young man tracks down his long-estranged father, a politico in exile, to demand the truth," according PH. "Explosive revelations make the political personal in this dazzling thriller."
Wilder, the world premiere musical by lyricist librettist Erin Cressida Wilson and composer-lyricists Mike Craver & Jack Herrick, plays the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, the intimate studio on the fourth floor of the PH HQ on West 42nd Street. It was bumped from 2002-03 into the 03-04 season. Lisa Portes directs the piece, "an erotic chamber musical about a boy who hits puberty while living in a Depression-era bordello."
The world premiere of Nottage's Fabulation?! will be seen in the Sharp,under the direction of Kate Whoriskey. Nottage is the playwright whose Crumbs From the Table of Joy has been seen around the country.
The play is billed this way: "Knocked up and seriously broke, a successful publicist is plunged into a topsy-turvy world of welfare mothers, drug addicts, and unctuous FBI agents. A darkly comic riches to rags tale of falling down and finding the beauty within."
All but Wilder and Fabulation?! play the mainstage at PH's new $27 million complex at 416 W. 42nd Street. For subscription information, call (212) 279-4200 or visit www.playwrightshorizons.org.
