1st Stage’s 2017-2018 will feature two plays by acknowledged masters, two other plays by up-and-coming artists (including a world premiere from a local playwright) and an evening of solo performances.
The season starts with an early play, Jesus Hopped the “A” Train, by Stephen Adly Guirgis (The Last Days of Judas Iscariot; The Motherfucker with the Hat; Between Riverside and Crazy). A young man awaits trial for shooting a cult leader; while locked away, his only human contact (other than his brutal guard) is a serial killer awaiting execution, who claims to have found God. When it opened, The New York Times’ Ben Brantley called it a “fire-breathing new drama” and a “probing, intense portrait of lives behind bars.” From September 7 to October 8 of this year.
1st Stage will start 2018 off with Aaron Sorkin’s (A Few Good Men) The Farnsworth Invention. Sorkin captures the struggle of two men trying to invent the same thing: a television. “[T]his is one of those Boomer-friendly, media-savvy, self-aware pieces of effective theater,” Chris Jones observed in the Chicago Tribune. From February 15 to March 11, 2018.
A romance that flourished in the Northeast blackout of 1965 forms the spine of 1st Stage’s next play, the musical Fly by Night, about two very different sisters in love with the same man, a sandwich maker and Broadway dreamer. The Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones called it a “melancholy little tuner, albeit infused with some poignant romance. At various times Tuesday night, it reminded me of ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!,’ ‘Prelude to a Kiss’ and, most of all, ‘A Catered Affair.'”. From April 12 to May 6 of next year.
A brand new play by DC area playwright/director Bob Bartlett, Swimming with Whales, will follow. In this world premiere, a 14-year-old boy and his father clash repeatedly over many things until they both stumble upon a beached, injured whale in the lower Outer Banks of North Carolina. Bartlett’s play will run from May 31 to June 24, 2018.
1st Stage will close its 2017-2018 season with a festival of solo performances, along with new play workshops and forums with artists and community leaders. This festival will run from July 12 to 22 of next year.
1st Stage plans to run another production between November 9 to December 23, 2017, but has not yet announced what that production is to be.
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