Chicago's Goodman Theater to See Contemporary 2007 Season

Chicago's Goodman Theater will be producing a 2007-08 season dominated by contemporary work. The season will open with Sarah Ruhl's (The Clean House) 3 1/2-hour Passion Play: A Cycle. According to Variety.com, Ruhl's epic will explore stagings of the Passion of the Christ in "Elizabethan England, Nazi Germany, and post-Vietnam South Dakota." The show has made its way from Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage and will take a new direction under Mark Wing-Davey in September.

Other upcoming Goodman Theater productions include Edward Machado's Cuba-based drama The Cook, directed by Henry Godinez, and Conor McPherson's Shining City, which played on Broadway last season and will again see direction by Robert Falls. As part of an in-the-works Foote Festival, Harris Yulin will drect and Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful.

Among the new works capping the season are the world premiere of Ifa Bayeza's The Ballad of Emmett Till, directed by Kate Whoriskey and based on interviews with survivors of the infamous 1955 lynching, and composer-lyricist Leslie Arden's anticipated The Boys Are Coming Home, a post World War II adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing under David Petrarca's direction and with a new book by Rebecca Gilman.

The Goodman's Latino Theater Festival, a biennial tradition, will return in August 2008.

The Goodman Theatre is locating at 170 N Dearborn St in Chicago, IL. For ticket and more schedule information, visit www.goodman-theatre.org or call (313) 443-3800.