Mark Rylance to Return to Guthrie in NICE FISH as Co-Writer, Star & Director; Full Season Announced!

Guthrie Director Joe Dowling today announced 11 mainstage productions of the theater's 2012-2013 season. The theater's 50th season and seventh on the Mississippi River looks ahead to a vital future with highlights including three new commissioned plays and works that deal vigorously with themes of war, race and politics through history and contemporary times.

The 2012-2013 Guthrie subscription season includes 10 productions, beginning with the previously announced celebration of the prolific and multifaceted Christopher Hampton. The celebration commences on the Wurtele Thrust Stage with Tales from Hollywood (September 15 – October 27, 2012), the historically based, sharp-witted story of German intellectual émigrés such as Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann who escaped the Nazi regime and found an uncertain new life in America, which will be directed by Ethan McSweeny (A View from the Bridge). The Hampton celebration will also feature the new Appomattox (September 29 – November 11, 2012), a wide-ranging work of historical scope encompassing the Civil War and Civil Rights eras of American history, directed by David Esbjornson (The Great Gatsby).

Christopher Bayes (actor, Guthrie: The Tempest, King Lear, Marat/Sade; director at Intiman Theater, Court Theater, Yale Repertory Theatre) will direct Carlo Goldoni's commedia dell'arte masterpiece The Servant of Two Masters (December 1, 2012 – January 20, 2013), a physical comedy about the wily Truffaldino and his schemes to fill his pockets and stomach, on the proscenium stage. Of the 2010 production of The Servant of Two Masters at Yale Repertory Theatre directed by Bayes and featuring Theatre de la Jeune Lune veteran Steven Epp (who will reprise his role as Truffaldino at the Guthrie), the Washington Post called it "as delightful and delicious a farce as you're likely to see."

The Guthrie subscription season continues on the thrust in 2013 with the first-ever Guthrie production of Eugene O'Neill's American classic Long Day's Journey into Night (January 12 – February 23, 2013), directed by Joe Dowling and featuring actors Helen Carey and Peter Michael Goetz. O'Neill's shattering story of a single night in the home of the Tyrone family, riven with betrayal, accusation, addiction and delusion will reunite Carey, Dowling and Goetz after lauded productions of Arthur Miller's All My Sons in 2002 and Death of a Salesman in 2004. Of Carey's performance as Mary Cavan Tyrone in the current Arena Stage production of the play, Peter Marks of the Washington Post wrote, "Degree by furtive degree, Carey provides as meticulously detailed a portrait of this anguishing character as I've ever encountered." Added the Washingtonian, "Goetz brings a comical brio and a mildness to the senior Tyrone, playing him not as a villain but as a selfish man who sees his own flaws."

The proscenium opens in 2013 with Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities (February 9 – March 24, 2013), directed by Peter Rothstein. Called "the best new play on Broadway" by the New York Times, its story of a homecoming fraught with memories of a tragic family event debuted at New York's Lincoln Center Theater and won the 2011 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play.

Britain's all-male company Propeller will perform Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Obie-winner The Taming of the Shrew (February 27 – April 6, 2013) in repertory on the thrust stage, directed by Edward Hall as part of the Guthrie's WorldStage Series. Noted for their wit, muscularity and vitality, Propeller has been termed "thrillingly fresh" and "sharp, contemporary and urgent" in the British press, and will deliver Shakespeare's two comedies of mistaken identities, transformations and deception.

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