Keegan Theatre will be keeping its focus firmly on its Celtic roots during its 2012-2013 season, with supplemental emphasis on searing American drama and on musicals with a little lilt and leer to them.
Of particular note, Keegan will be the first theater in this region to take on Martin McDonough’s A Behanding in Spokane, where a mysterious stranger – a handless horseman – roams the countryside looking for his missing appendage and the moronic small-time hoods who may be responsible for its separation from the rest of him. Behanding will run from March 16 to April 6 of next year.
Keegan is also performing A Couple of Blaguards, Frank (“Angela’s Ashes”) and Malachy McCourt’s account of their early days in Brooklyn after a childhood, and young adulthood, of Irish poverty. Performed to Irish traditional incidental music, Blaguards will open Keegan’s season and run from September 21 to October 14, 2012.
And Keegan’s Christmas show will once again be An Irish Carol by company member Matthew J. Keenan. In part an homage to Dickens’ masterpiece, Irish Carol traces a day in the life of a hard-hearted Irish pub owner who – perhaps too late – reviews his past and sees his lonely future. From December 15 to 30 of this year.
Keegan is salting its season with a few salty musicals, including the Kander and Ebb classic Cabaret, which will run from January 26 to February 23 of next year. Cabaret takes us into the heart of decadence – a nightclub in Weimar Germany, the darkness before the dreadful dawn of Nazism.
Keegan will also present the American musical version of The Full Monty, a collaboration between Terrence McNally and David Yazbeck. The dispossessed workingmen are now steelworkers from Buffalo, New York, and to feed their families they fall upon the ultimate jobs plan (attention: Obama and Romney) – to work as male strippers. From May 4 to June 1, 2013.
The company will also present a couple of high-stakes American dramas, starting with Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, an account of two business partners during the second war who sold defective parts to the army. One of them went to jail but the other was able to convince the court of his innocence. Now his son wants to marry the daughter of the convicted partner, and the father’s carefully constructed life begins to unravel. All My Sons will run from November 3 to December 1 of this year.
David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole will bring us face to face with a young couple whose 4-year-old child has died. Repeated studies confirm that the loss of a child is the most stressful event that can happen in a person’s life; Lindsay-Abaire’s play examines the tragedy after the tragedy. From June 22 to July 13, 2013.
Keegan closes its season with Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, a military-courtroom drama in which a murder trial opens up a wormy backstory of torture and intrigue. Based on an incident which occurred in Guantanamo Bay in 1986, A Few Good Men was made into a movie with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. A Few Good Men runs from August 10 to September 7, 2013.
Check here for online tickets for the Keegan’s 16th season, which will be available soon.
