American History — some real, some imagined — will mark Arena’s ten-production 2020-2021 season.
The inaugural show at the Mead Center for American Theater will be a world-premiere musical about one of the nation’s seminal historic figures, Frederick Douglass. Marcus Hummon’s American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in his Own Words, directed and co-written by Charles Randolph-Wright, uses the famed abolitionist’s own words as the production’s foundation. Veteran actor Cornelius Smith Jr. (ABC’s Scandal and All my Children) plays Douglass. From July 10 to August 16, 2020, at the Kreeger.
The Kreeger then hosts another world premiere — Teresa Rebeck’s Enlightenment. Rebeck, whose pointed comments about the disadvantages which female playwrights face may have touched off efforts, here and elsewhere, to highlight work written by women, here crafts a story about a Revolutionary-era Pennsylvanian who is inspired by thoughts of equality emanating from the finest minds in London and Philadelphia — while oblivious to the low estate of his wife and slaves. Rebeck will direct her own play, which runs from September 11 to October 18 of this year.
Monologist Mike Daisey will be in the Kogod Cradle from October 9 to November 1, 2020 with The Change, which confronts global warming and our attitude toward it.
The Arena production which follows — the musical Catch me if you Can — sounds like a work of fiction but is not. It’s the (mostly) true story of Frank William Abagnale, Jr., one of America’s most successful con men, who impersonated a lawyer, a doctor, and an airline pilot (among others) while bamboozling folks out of millions of dollars — while still a teenager! Stephen Spielberg presented the story in a movie (with Leonard DiCaprio) roughly twenty years ago; the team of Terrence McNally, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman have raised the stakes by adding song and dance. Corbin Bleu, the charmer from Arena’s Anything Goes, returns to the company in this production as the loveable con. Vulture’s Scott Brown called it “a natty little boutonniere of ear-tickling pastiche and ersatz Rat Pack swagger.” Arena Artistic Director Molly Smith directs; Parker Esse is the choreographer. From October 23 to December 13 of this year at the Fichandler.
In Naked Wilson, the playwright-actor Anna Campbell critiques August Wilson’s masculine perspective by delivering the dynamic monologues of Fences’ Troy Maxson while in the nude. But Arena isn’t bringing us Naked Wilson, a play which does not exist in real life. Instead, Pearl Cleage’s Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous tells the story of (the also fictional) Ms. Campbell’s return to the States after twenty-five years in Europe, because her play, once a national sensation, is being staged again at a Women’s Theater Festival. But, to her shock, Ms. Campbell is not being asked to reprise her role, which is being given to a younger actor. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Wendell Brock, in a mixed review, noted that “Cleage delivers crowd-pleasing entertainment that is sure to delight her faithful following.” Susan V. Booth, who directed the world premiere in Atlanta, directs this offering, which will run from November 12 to December 20, 2020, in the Kreeger.
Arena inaugurates the new year with a musical which has set box offices in Canada on fire. Britta Johnson’s Life After is the story of a sixteen-year-old who gets in a fight with her father, a well-known self-help author — a few hours before he dies in a car crash. Complicating matters, he had no reason to be where he was when he died. Though the musical is only seventy-five minutes long, “[t]he emotional territory it covers, the characters it empathetically draws…the thematic heft it carries and the sheer impact of the production rival any full-length, two-act play,” says Toronto Star reviewer Carly Maga. The musical won best musical award from the 2015 Toronto Fringe Festival, where, Maga notes, it “drew early comparisons between Johnson, only 26, and Stephen Sondheim.” This musical will run from January 15 to February 21 of next year in the Kreeger; Annie Tippe directs.
After that, Arena will present one of the great classics of Japanese — or any — literature, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashoman, here adapted by Fay Kanin and Michael Kanin. This is a story of an encounter between a samurai, his wife and a bandit. The samurai is dead and the wife violated — but what actually happened? There are three wildly different accounts, including one by a psychic. “Fay and Michael Kanin’s play, so vividly adapted for the stage from Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s writings, equates truth with a three-way mirror. The vision you get depends on the point of view,” Sylvie Drake observed in a 1986 review for the Los Angeles Times. “Few plays afford such opportunities to probe man’s infinite capacity for bending the truth to emblazon his ego.” Seema Seuko will direct this play in the Fichandler from February 5 to March 7, 2021.
The 1921 Tulsa race riots destroyed a thriving African-American community. In Nathan Alan Davis’s (Dontrell Who Kissed the Sea) The High Ground, an African American soldier returns to his home town resolved to return his community to its former glory. By himself, if necessary. At the Kogod Cradle February 26 to April 11 of next year; Megan Sandberg-Zakian directs.
After that: Crumbs from the Table of Joy, an early work by the two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. In it, seventeen-year-old Ernestine has moved with her sister and their widowed father from their home in Jim Crow Florida to Brooklyn. It is 1950, and Ernestine is a huge fan of the movies — where the happy endings she so wishes for herself and her family are manifest. But an adventure of a different sort ensues when her father brings a White woman he met on the subway home for dinner. “Nottage’s great gift at creating a sense of time and place both familiar and fresh is already in sharp focus in this 23-year-old play,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Kerry Reid in 2018. Hana S. Sharif will direct this play, which will run from April 2 to May 2, 2021 in the Fichandler.
Arena wraps up its season with another world premiere, Craig Lucas’ Change Agent. It is 1962, and the Cuban missile crisis looms. In this Molly Smith-directed play, Lucas marches figures from history (sung and unsung) to illuminate the days in which we came closest to global thermonuclear war. From April 23 to May 30 of next year, at the Kreeger.
Arena Stage 2020-2021 subscriptions available here.
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