Stephanie Ybarra’s first season as Artistic Director of Baltimore Center Stage will be full of new stories from fresh artists but will also include one of the oldest stories in all of theater — will run, in short, from Backhaus to the Bacchae.
Center Stage’s 2019-2020 season will start out with a musical it is co-producing with Olney Theatre — Quiara Alegria Hudes (In the Heights) and Erin McKeown’s Miss You Like Hell. This is a story about a woman, free-spirited and undocumented, who spirits her estranged daughter away on an epic road trip. Jesse Green’s mixed New York Times review concluded that the show “is a powerful example of what musicals do best: explore the unprotected border where individual needs and social issues intermix.” Rebecca Rodriguez directs; from September 12 to October 13, 2019.
Broadway star Taye Diggs makes his directorial debut with Keenan Scott II’s Thoughts of a Colored Man. This multi-disciplinary meditation on the life of an African-American community received workshop treatment at Arena last year;. Eleanor J. Bader of Theatre is Easy called an earlier production “Important” and “beautifully poetic.” From October 10 to November 10 of this year.
Baltimore Center Stage closes out 2019 with Jaclyn Backhaus’ Men on Boats. In 1869, John Wesley Powell led an expedition which sailed down the Green and Colorado Rivers and discovered the Grand Canyon. Is this them? Well, sort of. All the men are played by women, and plenty of extra-historical stuff occurs, but as the New York Times’ Ben Brantley says, ” ‘Men on Boats’ starts from the realization that we can never recreate exactly how it was. This play’s perspective is that of a contemporary reader filtering accounts of another age through her own latter-day sensibility.” From November 29 to December 22, 2019; Jenny Koons directs.
Baltimore Center Stage opens 2020 with two world premieres. Richard & Jane & Dick & Sally sounds like one of the old 1st-grade readers. But Richard is a widower who is terminally ill; Sally is deaf, and the whole family must reconcile now if they are ever going to reconcile. Noah Diaz won the Jean Kennedy Smith playwriting award from the Kennedy Center for this script. From January 23 to February 16 of next year; Baltimore Center Stage has not yet announced a director.
On March 19, 2020, Baltimore Center Stage will launch Donnetta Lavinia Grays’ Where We Stand, in which, the company asserts, “one passionate storyteller spins a supernatural tale of loneliness seduced by kindness.” Tamilla Woodard directs; from March 19 to April 12, 2020. (The production will be on tour April 14-26).
After a season of strikingly fresh and original shows, Baltimore Center Stage will dip back roughly twenty-five hundred years for The Bacchae, Euripides’ tale of the day when the god of sensuality, Dionysius, turned mean. But this is not your father’s Bacchae; it is, instead, Mike Donahue’s — described by Christopher Arnott of the New Haven Advocate as “outrageous and engaging….[brought] into the modern day with raucous fury. There are slews of surprises…but the biggest surprise if you ever had to endure dry, stiff, morose cocktail parties with Classics professors…is how nasty and sleazy and fun and absolutely non-academic this sensational evening is.” From April 30 to May 24 of next year; Donahue will direct.
