New Mexico Actors Lab Announces 2025 Season

New Mexico Actors Lab 2025 Season features five engaging and compelling plays by award-winning playwrights: Bike America by Mike Lew (May 1-18), the premiere of local playwright Dale Dunn's A Subtle Kind of Murder (June 5-22), Cowboy Mouth by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith (September 11 - 28), Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive (October 16 - November 2), and The Half Life of Marie Curie by Lauren Gunderson (November 20 - December 7).

Tickets are now on sale at the NMAL website, www.nmactorslab.com. Season Flex Passes are $160 (five shows or admissions for the price of four). Individual tickets are $40, with discounted tickets (see website for details) and two preview performances costing $20.

Award-winning playwright, Mike Lew's Bike America is a wildly theatrical picaresque journey that crams the entire continent onto one stage. The play peddles the audience along a cross-country bike trip from Boston to California, with stops in big cities and small towns along the way. Heroine Penny is looking to bring more meaning into her life, so she drops her clingy boyfriend in Beantown and takes off for Santa Barbara. Along the way she befriends a colorful crew of bikers and develops insights on our cultural obsession with happiness. Artistic Director Emily Rankin will direct.

In Subtle Kind of Murder, Jane is a writer under contract to adapt a noir murder mystery for the screen. As she struggles to meet her deadline, Jane is unable to ignore parallels with the abuse she endured during her early days in Hollywood. Centered around the haunting mystery novel In A Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes, the play examines what happens when the past collides with the present, and how that collision may pave the way for an inspired future. Lynn Goodwin will direct this new play by Dale Dunn.

Cowboy Mouth, by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith, is an urban fable about a woman who kidnaps a young man at gunpoint, taking him hostage from his wife and child to make him a pop prophet, ''like a rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth." Zoe Lesser will direct this exhilarating and poetic play that serves as a cautionary tale about using art as deliverance from our flaws and relating to someone's potential instead of who they are.

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, is a wildly funny, surprising and devastating tale of survival as seen through the lens of a troubling relationship between a young girl and an older man. Village Voice described it as "...a tremendous achievement, genuine and genuinely disturbing...This is, quite simply, the sweetest and most forgiving play ever written about child abuse...Vogel's delicate tactic makes sense not only as a way to redouble the dramatic effect, but as a representation of reality, a perfect case of the form fitting the subject." Emily Rankin will direct

In 1911, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. By 1912, she was the object of ruthless gossip over an alleged affair, all but erasing her achievements from public memory. Weakened and demoralized by the press, Marie joins her friend and colleague Hertha Ayrton, an electromechanical engineer and suffragette, to recover from the scandal at Hertha's seaside retreat on the British coast. The Half-life of Marie Curie, which will be directed by NMAL founder Robert Benedetti, revels in the power of female friendship as it explores the relationship between these two brilliant women, both of whom are mothers, widows, and fearless champions of scientific inquiry.

BIKE AMERICA: May 1-4, 8-11, and 15-18

A SUBTLE KIND OF MURDER: June 5-8, 12-15, and 19-22

COWBOY MOUTH: September 11-14, 18-21, and 25-28

HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE: October 16-19, 23-26, and October 30 - November 2

THE HALF LIFE OF MARIE CURIE: November 20-23, 28-30, and December 4-7

Performances Thursday through Saturday evenings at 7:30 p.m., Sunday matinees at 2 p.m., with the first Thursday a limited seating preview at 7:30 p.m. All performances at The Lab Theater, 1213 Parkway, Santa Fe - - one block from Meow Wolf.

Additional information at www.nmactorslab.com

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.