Meadow Brook Theatre, Michigan's largest professional theatre, will stage the world premiere of resident playwright Karim Alrawi's Killing Time, a thriller on the subject of assisted suicide, in its 2000-2001 season.

The script won a 1999 Canadian Theatre National Playwriting Award and is based on real events that transpired in Michigan in the 1990s. A physician counsels a patient on assisted suicide as the patient's daughter struggles to convince her mother about continuing life. Oakland County, where Meadow Brook is based, was ground zero in the 1990s for the assisted suicide campaign of Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

Despite the fact that Alrawi is the troupe's playwright-in-residence, the script is listed as "pending availability." Announced dates are Feb. 14- March 11, 2001. The playwright penned Chagall's Arabian Nights and A Gift of Glory, staged at Meadow Brook in 1999 and 1998.

Debra L. Wicks, interim artistic director of the LORT theatre in Rochester, MI, announced a season that includes the Wendy Kesselman rewrite of The Diary of Anne Frank (Oct. 18-Nov. 12), Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (Sept. 13-Oct. 8), the annual Charles Nolte version of A Christmas Carol (Nov. 25-Dec. 24), James Goldman's historical comedy, The Lion in Winter (Jan. 10-Feb. 4, 2001), Arthur Miller's The Crucible (March 21 April 15, 2001) and the musical, Little Shop of Horrors (April 25-May 20, 2001).

For information, call (248) 377-3300. -- By Kenneth Jones