Cromer Will Stage Midwest Premiere of Cherrywood in Chicago

By Kenneth Jones
06 Oct 2009

David Cromer
David Cromer

David Cromer, director of Broadway's new productions of Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound, and Off-Broadway's acclaimed Adding Machine and Our Town, will direct the Midwest premiere of Kirk Lynn's Cherrywood for Chicago's Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company in spring 2010.

The troupe known for edgy plays announced three Midwest-premiere titles for its 2009-10 season.

Opening in June 2010, Cherrywood: the modern comparable is billed as a "fascinatingly feral ensemble piece" that is "written as a series of simple lines, a play without characters, allowing the actors to assemble their roles from the lines they chose to speak, originally devised and created by the Rude Mechanicals and Kirk Lynn (Austin, TX) in 2004."

According to production notes, "Cherrywood is a play about a neighborhood…probably unlike any place you’ve lived before. Or maybe it actually is all the neighborhoods you’ve ever lived in. What starts off as a simple housewarming party, careens into a recruitment mission where werewolves cut frustrated party-goers from the herd, one-by-one, offering personal transformation in the form of a glass of milk. But someone brought a gun to the party and hiding it will only randomize the victim. The solution to the mystery is not who is responsible for the trauma, but what trauma we would inflict if we were responsible for making the world in the image of our desires. This is a high-larious and intriguing bender loaded with great music, social commentary, and cutting edge structure."

Also on the Mary-Arrchie season are:

  • How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found by Fin Kennedy (November 2009), directed by artistic director Richard Cotovsky. Featuring ensemble members Carlo Lorenzo Garcia and Shannon Clausen with guest artists Scott Danielson, James Eldrenkamp, Kasia Januszewski, Kristina Johnson, Kevin Stark, Britni Tozzi.

    "If you had to disappear from your life, would you be able to delete yourself from Facebook? In this thrilling new play, a young advertising executive reaches the breaking point and decides to buck the system. He turns to an expert who can give him a detailed lesson in the art of escape. The mission? To dispose of everything that defined his former self. It's an adrenaline-charged, apocalyptic journey to the edge of existence."

    How To Disappear won the 38th Arts Council John Whiting Award for New Theatre Writing and a 2007 Peter Brook Award. It enjoyed a sell-out world premiere at Sheffield Crucible in 2007. Its U.S. premiere took place at PCS in Portland, Oregon in January 2009.

  • The Rant by Andrew Case (rights pending, February 2010). "A gripping drama exploring racial bias and the perilous path to justice. When an young African-American autistic boy is gunned down by police in the Bronx, an investigator sets out to expose the officer's crime only to learn that the truth itself is a sort of bias. She must wade through prejudice, deceit, and a volley of anonymous threats to find where culpability and truth really lie."

    The Rant is based on Andrew Case's eight years of experience working on police misconduct issues for the City of New York. The Rant was originally developed at PlayPenn and has been produced at the New Theatre in Miami (Carbonell nomination, Best New Play), InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia (Barrymore nomination, Best New Play), and New Jersey Repertory Theatre in Long Branch, New Jersey.

    For more information, visit www.maryarrchie.com.