The Public Theater Announces 2014-2015 Season
This week The Public Theater announced its 2014-2015 season. We were thrilled to see many of our favorite active artists on the schedule, including Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks and Obie winners Young Jean Lee and Lear DeBessonet.
Tickets to the new productions will go on sale at a later date, memberships are on sale now. For more information visit The Public Theater’s website.
The Public Theater’s program for 2014-2015:
(Descriptions provided by The Public Theater)
The Winter’s Tale
Written by William Shakespeare
Music and lyrics by Lear DeBessonet and Todd Almond
Conceived and directed by Lear DeBessonet
Conceived and directed by Obie Award winner Lear deBessonet with musical adaptation by Todd Almond and choreography by Chase Brock, Public Works’ The Winter’s Tale brings Shakespeare’s tale of mystery and magic to life as never before. Featuring Public Works’ signature blend of professional actors, community members, and special guests, 200 New Yorkers will come together to tell Shakespeare’s beloved fable of hard won joy and the promise of renewal.
Rock Bottom
By Bridget Everett, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman
Additional music by Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Matt Ray
Directed by Scott Wittman
Originally commissioned as part of The Joe’s Pub 2013 New York Voices series, Rock Bottom will have a full theatrical run as part of The Public’s 2014-15 season. Written by the ferociously talented Bridget Everett with Tony Award-winning songwriting duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman plus additional music collaboration by Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Matt Ray, Rock Bottom is the entertainer’s first major production since her 2007 musical At Least It’s Pink. Rock Bottom is what happens when you’re too passionate to give up, and too big to fail. In it, Everett, who The New York Times has called an “early Bette Midler,” barrels through life tip-toeing toward disaster, wine bottle by wine bottle and man by man. However, instead of succumbing to a chardonnay-induced stupor, Everett embraces a series of revelations that lead her and her voice of an angel to redemption. It features new original songs written with Shaiman, Wittman, Ray and Horovitz, as well as familiar favorites heard in Everett’s monthly sold-out showcase with her band The Tender Moments at Joe’s Pub.
The Fortress of Solitude
Book by Itamar Moses
Music and lyrics by Michael Friedman
Conceived and directed by Daniel Aukin
Based upon the novel by Jonathan Lethem
Conceived and directed by Daniel Aukin, based on the acclaimed novel by Jonathan Lethem, the soaring new musical The Fortress of Solitude makes its world premiere this fall with a dynamite creative team including composer/lyricist Michael Friedman (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) and bookwriter Itamar Moses. The Fortress of Solitude is the extraordinary coming-of-age story about 1970s Brooklyn and beyond — of black and white, soul and rap, block parties and blackouts, friendship and betrayal, comic books and 45s. And the story of what would happen if two teenagers obsessed with superheroes believed that maybe, just maybe, they could fly. Co-production with Dallas Theater Center.
Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, 3)
Written by Suzan-Lori Parks
Directed by Jo Bonney
Pulitzer Prize winner and The Public’s Master Writer Chair Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog, The Book of Grace) continues her longstanding relationship with The Public Theater with Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), a devastatingly beautiful, dramatic work set over the course of the Civil War. Jo Bonney directs this moving and haunting drama comprised of three plays presented in a single performance. In Part 1, “A Measure of Man,” Hero, a slave who is accustomed to his master’s lies, must now decide whether to join him on the Confederate battlefield in exchange for a promise of freedom. Part 2, “The Battle in the Wilderness” follows Hero and the Colonel as they lead a captured Union solider toward the Confederate lines as the cannons approach. Finally, in Part 3, “The Union of My Confederate Parts,” the loved ones Hero left behind question whether to escape or wait for his return – only to discover that for Hero, freedom may have come at a great spiritual cost. A masterful new work from one of our most lyrical and powerful writers, Father Comes Home From the Wars is a deeply personal epic about love and hope in a world of impossible choices. Presented in association with American Repertory Theater.
Straight White Men
Written and directed by Young Jean Lee
Featuring Austin Pendleton, Scott Shepherd, Pete Simpson, and James Stanley
The New York Times has named Obie Award winner Young Jean Lee (The Public’s Church and We’re Gonna Die) “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation.” The Public presents the New York premiere of Straight White Men, in which she defies expectations with a conventionally structured take on the classic American father-son drama. When Ed and his three adult sons come together to celebrate Christmas, they enjoy cheerful trash-talking, pranks, and takeout Chinese. Then they confront a problem that even being a happy family can’t solve: when identity is the cornerstone of one’s worth, and privilege is increasingly problematic, what is the value of being a straight white man? Straight White Men is a production by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company and is commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Center Theater Group (Los Angeles), Steirischer Herbst Festival (Graz), Les Spectacles Vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris), Festival d’Automne à Paris, and The Public Theater (New York).
Hamilton
Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Directed by Thomas Kail
Featuring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton
From the groundbreaking team behind the Tony Award-winning musical In The Heights comes a wildly inventive new show about the life, death and rhymes of a scrappy young immigrant who forever changed America: Alexander Hamilton. Tony and Grammy Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda takes the stage as the unlikely founding father determined to make his mark on the new nation as hungry and ambitious as he is. From bastard orphan to Washington’s right hand man, rebel to war hero, a loving husband caught in the country’s first sex scandal, the Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy, Hamilton is an astonishing musical exploration of a political mastermind who was both sinner and saint. George Washington, Eliza Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Hamilton’s lifelong friend/foil Aaron Burr all make their mark in this uproarious, heart-filled new musical. Tony Award nominee Thomas Kail directs Lin-Manuel Miranda’s breathtaking fusion of contemporary hip-hop and classic Broadway style in this bold new show about taking your shot, speaking your mind and turning the world upside down. Hamilton is produced with the support of Jeffrey Seller, Sander Jacobs, and Jill Furman.
The Total Bent
Text by Stew
Music by Heidi Rodewald and Stew
Directed by Joanna Settle
Stew and Heidi Rodewald, creators of the Tony Award-winning show Passing Strange, team with director Joanna Settle to bring their thrilling new musical, The Total Bent, to The Public next spring. A riotous new show at the crossroads of the sacred and profane, survival and liberation, gospel and rock ‘n’ roll. When a British record producer arrives in Montgomery, Alabama to hook Marty Roy, a young black musical prodigy rebelling from the constraints of the world around him, he launches us back into Marty’s tumultuous musical upbringing. The son of a gospel star and self-proclaimed healer, Marty spent his childhood writing the songs that have made his charismatic father famous. But in an America on the verge of social upheaval, Marty finds himself at odds with his complicated and spiritually forceful father, desperate to make his own way and his own sound. A funny, fiery, one-of-a-kind show, The Total Bent is about the passions that divide a father and son as they make their music and make their choice between salvation and selling out.
Toast
By Lemon Anderson
Directed by Elise Thoron
Toast is an electrifying new play by acclaimed spoken word artist and Tony Award-winning writer Lemon Andersen (The Public’s County of Kings: The Beautiful Struggle, HBO’s “Def Poetry”), directed by Andersen’s County of Kings collaborator Elise Thoron. A Public Theater commission first presented at The Public’s Under the Radar Festival, Toast ingeniously weaves major characters from black oral narratives into a gripping story about a group of inmates fighting to keep their minds free amidst the 1971 riots that rocked Attica Prison. After 27 years served for murder in Attica’s D-Block, Willie Green, aka Dolomite, has become an unlikely father figure to his cellmates, folklore heroes like Jesse James, Hobo Ben, Annabelle Jones, Stackolee and Hard Rock. Though word is brewing throughout Attica that a riot is coming, Dolomite would rather not get involved. But when one of the youngest inmates in their block is viciously beaten by guards for protesting prison conditions, Dolomite has to decide whether to join the riots or lock himself in his cell and hope for a promised parole date and the chance to taste freedom. Honoring the spoken word narratives recited in pool halls, bars and prisons across America by generations of black poets, Toast is a stunning new play about men trying to live free in a system—and a world—designed to keep them chained. Toast was developed, in part, at the Sundance Institute Theatre Program. Funding for the development of Toast is provided by Time Warner Inc., and the MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In addition, The Public’s 2014-2015 will include the annual Under The Radar Festival and the Mobile Shakespeare Unit, which brings free Shakespeare productions to all five boroughs.