The Golden Dragon, Roland Schimmelphennig’s Mülheim Award-winning play which begins with four cooks pulling the tooth of a co-worker in an Asian restaurant and morphs into forty-eight vignettes about the immigrant’s world – some of astonishing violence and dispair – will highlight Studio Theatre’s 2011-2012 season, the company announced yesterday.
The play won the prestigious Mülheim Award for best German-language drama, beating out works by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning Elfreide Jelinek. In announcing the €15,000 prize, the jury President claimed that “It has within it everything that one could possibly desire from a play.” It will run from November 2 to December 11 of this year.
Studio’s eleven-play season will feature a U.S. premiere in February of next year – British writer Roy Williams’ Sucker Punch. The play, in which two close friends come up through the boxing ranks together only to be driven apart by politics, will run from February 29 to April 8. You can see a trailer from the Royal Court Theatre production here.
The remaining season includes some more familiar offerings, including Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a somewhat ahistorical reimagining of our 7th President as a rock star (July 11 – August 12, 2012), and Time Stands Still, Donald Margulies’ story about a photojournalist, badly injured in Iraq, who resists the blandishments of her reporter boyfriend that she not go back (January 4 – February 12, 2012). Time Stands Still will feature a performance by multiple Helen Hayes-recipient Holly Twyford.
The season kicks off with a story about a collaboration between two towering mid-century artists, Benjamin Britton and W.H. Auden. Written by History Boys playwright Alan Bennett , The Habit of Art is, according to critic Michael Billington of The Guardian, “a multi-leveled work that deals with sex, death, creativity, biography and much else besides.” The production, which will feature Ted Van Griethuysen, will run from September 7 to October 6 of this year.
The five-play subscription series will close with a production of Bachelorette, Leslye Headland’s story of bad girls having a bad night on the eve of a wedding. The play, which the New York Times says is “Written with stiletto-sharp wit”, will run from May 23 to July 1 of 2012.
In addition to the subscription series (which does not include Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), Studio will present a world premiere of Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs (September 28 – October 16, 2011), which Studio describes as “an intimate look at how two people navigate chance, change, and consequence,” Bust, (November 30 – December 18, 2011), comedian Lauren Weedman’s solo show about being a volunteer advocate in a woman’s prison, The Animals and Children Take to the Streets (June 13 – July 1, 2011), in which human actors interact with animations, Natsu Onoda Power’s Astro Boy and the God of Comics (February 15 – March 11, 2012), a world premiere which Studio calls a “high/low-tech multimedia extravaganza, featuring on-stage drawing, interactive video, and 1960s-style animation” and Dan LeFranc’s The Big Meal (April 25 – May 20, 2012), in which a family pours out its most memorable experiences from the table of a chain restaurant.
Tickets for the season are available through the Studio Theatre box office, 202-332-3300. Click here for more season details.
