Beyond the biggies
Drama outside the District: From Stoppard to the vibrator play to QB crime,great theater stretches Houston's boundaries
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Tom Stoppard's "Utopia" trilogy won seven Tony Awards for its New Yorkproduction. Now Houston will become the first U.S. city outside of the Big Appleto stage all three productions. -
The Wonderettes are getting a sequel. -
Ensemble has a play about the Lotto's "luck." -
Main Street will put on one about a beloved quarterback who's committed a"senseless crime." Not that it's based on anyone in real life.
The 18th annual Theater District Open House happens Sunday, allowing Houston’s biggest performing arts organizations to — sometimes literally — toot their own horns about their upcoming 2011-2012 seasons.
These performance giants certainly deserve their day-long preview celebration, but when it comes to H-Town’s great live theater, it can’t be confined to one district. This might be a good time to remember some of the other companies that might be upstaged during this time of year.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the 2011-2012 drama outlook for some our outside-the-District theaters.
Stages Repertory Theatre
Winter musicals and a one-woman show keep Stages busy for the rest of the year. In October, one of Stages’ favorites actors, Susan O. Koozin, plays seven different characters with seven different perspectives on the same event in Robert Hewett’s The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead. Then when November hopefully brings some cooler weather, Stages will be ready with two musical comedies, The Winter Wonderettes and a Panto Red Riding Hood.
Stages kept extending the run of The Marvelous Wonderettes last season, so it’s no surprise that it's presenting a sequel. Its yearly offering of a new Panto play is a good antidote to those of us who like a little holiday cheer but have had enough of the same traditional shows every year.
Once the year turns, Stages will stage an intriguing mix of contemporary plays. Playwright and television writer Craig Wright depicts the life of a Broadway producer in the comedy Mistakes Were Made. In recent years, The Alley Theatre has produced several of Sarah Ruhl’s works, like Clean House and Eurydice, but in March it’s Stages who will probably excite audiences with her more recent play: In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, which wins my vote for most memorable title of the season.
Next up is an earlier play from one of today’s most acclaimed female playwrights, Yasmina Reza and her The Unexpected Man. The season ends with the 2009 Tony winning musical, Next to Normal.
Ensemble Theatre
The 2011-2012 season also just happens to be the 35th anniversary of Ensemble, the Southwest’s oldest African-American theatre. Ensemble begins with Cliff Roquemore’s Lotto, a play that looks at how one stroke of 10 million dollar luck can change a family. The theatre rings out 2011 with the African American Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Cinderella, like Stage’s Panto, a welcome bit of holiday show variety.
2012 begins with Ifa Bayeza’s Edgar Award winning The Ballad of Emmett Till, a play Ensemble describes as a work “told through contemporary prose with the infusion of jazz.” Then, contemporary life in an African-American barbershop is depicted in Charles Randolph Wright’s comedy Cuttin’ Up. Over many seasons Ensemble has been working its way through the 10 plays of the late, very great, Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning playwright August Wilson’s Pittsburgh (or Century) Cycle.
In May, Ensemble completes the project with King Hedley II. It ends the season with Javon Johnson’s “gospel comedy” Sanctified.
Main Street Theater
Main Street might have the city’s most ambitious seasons as it takes on several world premieres, attempts a Tom Stoppard trilogy and continues its relationship with the Prague Shakespeare Festival. Main Street begins the season in September with the world premiere Woof by Y York about a beloved quarterback who commits a “senseless crime” on camera.
With a title like Woof it will be interesting to see if the play is based on any real life people or events.
The other world premiere, the two-woman play Cakewalk by Nalsey Tinberg depicts the relationship between a Holocaust refugee and her American daughter.
The New York production of Utopia won seven Tonys and Main Street will be the first United States theatre outside New York to produce all three plays in the series.
On Jan. 12, Main Street rings in the new year with the production I’m personally most excited about, Sir Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy. The three-play set “chronicles a group of real-life Russian intellectuals dreaming of revolution” between 1833-1866.
Stoppard tends to create plays that truly play with ideas, ranging from quantum physics and chaos theory to history and economics to the nature of reality and memory, but his characters are always nuanced and alive, never just flat representatives for those abstract ideas. The New York production of Utopia won seven Tonys and Main Street will be the first United States theatre outside New York to produce all three plays in the series.
Spring brings another co-production with the Prague Shakespeare Festival and one of the best loved of Shakespeare’s villains, Richard III. In May, the official season ends with the regional premier of the Alan Ayckbourn comedy, My Wonderful Day, which tells the “recommended for mature audiences due to profanity” story of 9-year-old Winnie’s wonderful day.
Still not enough theatre to fill your every evening and weekend? In September, Catastrophic Theatre performs Mickle Maher’s There is a Happiness That Morning Is, with dialogue spoken entirely in rhymed verse. And then in December, Catastrophic brings to Diverse Works Obie award-winning Lisa D’Amour’s Anna Bella Eema, a “ghost story to be spoken and sung.”
If cabaret is more your thing, one of Houston’s newest theater companies, Music Box Theater celebrates Damaged Divas of the Decades in the fall and then puts another new holiday production under the city’s tree with Fruitcakes.
Want to help influence a company’s play selection process? Check out Mildred's Umbrella’s Fresh Ink Reading Series
And if you’d rather not be warned your evening is recommended for mature audiences, head over to the A.D Players, where founder Jeannette Clift George’s comedy Faces begins in September and the Blue Ridge Mountains set musical Foxfire goes on stage in February.
Whew, that’s an abundance of drama, comedy and musicals to choose from, yet it’s only a partial summary of what the 2011-2012 season holds. We have almost as many theatre (and theater) companies as we do bayous, so keep the CultureMap Events Calendar bookmarked and hold on for a very dramatic performance year.
