Actors Theatre will stage four Arizona premieres, three by women playwrights, during the 2014-15 season. All shows will be performed at the Helen K. Mason Performing Arts Center at Black Theatre Troupe ending Actors Theatre’s nomadic venture at different Valley venues during 2013-14.
“After being nomadic last season, we’re excited to do our entire season at Black Theatre Troupe,” said Actors Theatre Artistic Director Matthew Wiener. “These four energetic and entertaining shows are going to bring a lot of joy to our audiences. These plays, from four amazing writers, are some of the newest and most powerful writing for theatre today. They are stories that matter.”
The season opens with Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, Oct. 24-Nov. 9. This provocative comedy from Pulitzer Prize nominee Rebeck follows four aspiring young novelists who sign up for private writing classes with Leonard, an international literary figure. Under his recklessly brilliant and unorthodox instruction, some thrive and others flounder, allegiances are made and broken, sex is used as a weapon and hearts are unmoored. The wordplay is not the only thing that turns vicious as innocence collides with experience in this biting Broadway comedy.
Annapurna by Sharr White follows from Jan. 16-Feb. 1, 2015. After 20 years apart, Emma tracks Ulysses to a trailer park in the middle of nowhere for a final reckoning. What unfolds is a visceral and profound meditation on love and loss with the simplest of theatrical elements: two people in one room. A breathtaking story about the longevity of love.
Stage Kiss by Sara Ruhl is the third play of the season, March 13-29, and is the third Ruhl play produced by Actors Theatre after Dead Man’s Cell Phone and In the Next Room (Or the Vibrator Play). It’s a story of art imitating life and life imitating art when two actors with history are thrown together as romantic leads in a forgotten 1930s melodrama. The two quickly lose touch with reality as the story onstage follows them off stage. Stage Kiss captures Ruhl’s singular voice and is a charming tale about what happens when lovers share a stage kiss – or when actors share a real one.
The final production is The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, May XX-17, a dramatic adaptation of her award-winning best-selling memoir which the New York Times called “an indelible portrait of a four-decade-long marriage.” In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play.
Season tickets go on sale beginning Aug. 1. Actors Theatre is offering a variety of season-ticket packages ranging from $108-$170. All tickets can be purchased online at www.actorstheatrephx.org.
