The 28th season for the company will also feature the new works No Child, Elections and Erections and Cardenio as well as Copenhagen and classics like Julius Caesar, Don Juan Giovanni and Figaro (the latter two in a repertory run).
"We have assembled eight productions that offer our audience the widest range of theatrical experiences," commented A.R.T. interim artistic director Gideon Lester and executive director Robert J. Orchard in the announcement. "From the grandeur of Shakespeare's Rome to the intimacy of political cabaret, from a stage adaptation of the cult film 'Donnie Darko' to a pairing of Mozart operas, reimagined by the team that brought Carmen to the A.R.T. two years ago."
The 2007-08 season (subject to change) follows:
Dominique Serrand directs the work produced in association with Theatre de la Jeune Lune. "A unique pair of productions that combine the beauty of Mozart with the brilliance of two of France's greatest comic writers." Both shows will be performed in repertory on one set, with a chamber ensemble accompanying a cast of actors and opera singers that includes Steven Epp (Harpagon in The Miser) and principals from Carmen.
Marcus Stern directs the work based on the screenplay by Richard Kelly. "During the presidential election of 1988, Donnie Darko, a troubled teenager, encounters a six foot rabbit named Frank, who tells him the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. Donnie returns home to discover that a jet engine has crashed through his bedroom — and so begins one of the strangest and most haunting stories ever told." The 2001 cult film (starring Drew Barrymore with Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal) makes the leap to the stage.
Scott Zigler stages the Michael Frayn 1941-set work which centers on "German physicist Werner Heisenberg [who] traveled to Copenhagen to meet his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. Old friends and colleagues, now they found themselves on opposite sides in a world war, and embroiled in a race to create the atom bomb." The play — to star Will LeBow, Karen MacDonald and John Kuntz — imagines the encounter.
Written and performed by Nilaja Sun, the new work stemmed from the star-creator's work as a teaching artist at a high school in the Bronx, "where every day the students face huge challenges in simply coming to school." Sun tackles all the roles in the piece transforming from students, teachers and parents to administrators, janitors and security guards.
Arthur Nauzyciel directs the William Shakespeare classic which focuses on "one of the greatest theatrical studies of tyranny, revolution, and civil war" in the drama centered around Julius Caesar, Brutus and the young Mark Antony.
Postponed from this season, the work written and performed by Pieter-Dirk Uys will make its U.S. premiere next season. The satirist Uys returns to Zero Arrow (following Foreign AIDS in A.R.T.'s 2005 South African Festival) with an "evening in the company of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Mrs. Evita Bezuidenhout ('the most famous white woman in South Africa') and of course their alter ego, Pieter Dirk Uys."
Les Waters stages the U.S. premiere of the new work by Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and playwright Charles Mee, which is billed as "a midsummer comedy of love based on Cardenio, a play by Shakespeare that was lost soon after its first performance." Greenblatt and Mee have woven fragments into a "contemporary reconstruction of the story, now set at a wedding party on the terrace of a villa in the Umbrian hills." For more information on A.R.T.'s season at the Loeb Drama Center (64 Brattle Street) and Zero Arrow Theatre (corner of Arrow Street and Massachusetts Avenue) in Harvard Square, Cambridge, visit amrep.org or call the A.R.T. InfoLine at (617) 547-8300.
