Love and death, murder and ghosts will raise their occasionally ugly but dramatically satisfying heads in Rep Stage’s 2020-2021 four-play season, the company announced Friday.
The Rep Stage season kicks off with Falsettos, the William Finn-James Lapine collaboration which focuses on a family reformed as the father confronts his true sexual orientation in the age of AIDS. Marvin has left his wife for his lover, but hangs on desperately to his relationship with his son. His ex-wife falls in love with the psychiatrist he found for her, and he is in danger of losing everything…and then AIDS begins to work its way across the landscape. And it’s a musical!
Finn wrote the music and lyrics, and co-wrote the book with Lapine (Sweeney Todd). ” It is impossible to leave the musical ‘Falsettos’ unmoved,” the Post’s Nelson Pressley said in a mixed review of a touring production of the musical at the Kennedy Center last year. Rep Stage Artistic Director Joseph Ritsch will direct this work, which will run from September 10-27, 2020.
In November, Rep Stage will present Jen Silverstein’s The Moors, a comic farce until it isn’t. Sisters Agatha and Hudley live in an ancient keep on the moors with their creepy servants, their co-dependent mastiff, and also a moor hen, when Emilie the governess — a sweet person whose previous charges have all mysteriously disappeared — arrives. Since Agatha’s and Hudley’s disagreeable brother Branford has also mysteriously disappeared, Emilie should be right at home. But Emilie’s confusion deepens as every room in the manse looks like every other room. “What defines the word ‘outrageous?’ I think it is Jen Silverman’s play ‘The Moors,’” says J. Peter Bergman of the Berkshire Edge. Craig Baldwin will direct this regional premiere, which will run from November 5 to 22 of this year.
Dane Figueroa Edidi’s new play, Ghost/Writer, will make its world debut at Rep Stage February 18 to March 7 of next year. In 1920, an Irish immigrant seeks the services of a Black woman to exorcise a ghost; nearly a hundred years later, a writer seeks the services of a ghost writer to help him through his writer’s block. According to the company, Ghost/Writer “examines the intersections of race and gender inviting us to explore the role of love, justice and joy in a world where the ghosts of the past have yet to be laid to rest.” Danielle A. Drakes directs.
Rep Stage will conclude its season with a production of Edward Albee’s Pulitzer-winning Seascape, in which a couple of long-married humans come to share life lessons with a couple of long-married lizard-like sea creatures. “Our curiosity always overwhelms our disbelief, and when Sarah and Leslie compare life experiences with Charlie and Nancy, it becomes almost ennobling,” DCTS said when it reviewed a production by the late, lamented American Century Theatre in 2009, calling it a “complex, beautiful play.” Laley Lippard will direct this production, which will run from April 29 to May 16, 2021.
Tickets for Rep Stage’s next season will become available June 1.
