Birmingham Festival Theatre Announces 2017-18 Season

Birmingham Festival Theatre has just announced its 2017-18 season! Below are descriptions for each show. The website is currently under a redesign. Stay tuned for Season Ticket deals!

September 21 - October 7, 2017

Becky's New Car By Steven Dietz

Director Kathleen Jensen

Have you ever been tempted to flee your own life? Becky Foster is caught in middle age, middle management and in a middling marriage-with no prospects for change on the horizon. Then one night a socially inept and grief-struck millionaire stumbles into the car dealership where Becky works. Becky is offered nothing short of a new life...and the audience is offered a chance to ride shotgun in a way that most plays wouldn't dare. BECKY'S NEW CAR is a thoroughly original comedy with serious overtones, a devious and delightful romp down the road not taken.

November 2 - 18, 2017

The DresserBy Ronald Harwood

Director Bethe Ensey

Based on the author's own experiences as dresser to Sir Donald Wolfit, this bracing, heartbreaking drama is an elegy to a by-gone era. Backstage at a theatre in the English provinces during WWII, Sir, the last of the great breed of English actor/managers, is in a bad way tonight, as his dresser Norman tries valiantly to prepare him to go on stage as King Lear. Unsure of his lines as well as who and where he is supposed to be, Sir is adamantly determined to roar his last.

January 11 - 27, 2018

Picasso at the Lapine Agile By Steve Martin

Director Mel Christian

This long running Off-Broadway absurdist comedy places Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso in a Parisian cafe in 1904, just before the renowned scientist transformed physics with his theory of relativity and the celebrated painter set the art world afire with cubism. In his first comedy for the stage, the popular actor and screenwriter plays fast and loose with fact, fame and fortune as these two geniuses muse on the century's achievements and prospects as well as other fanciful topics with infectious dizziness. Bystanders, including Picasso' agent, the bartender and his mistress, Picasso's date, an elderly philosopher, Charles Dabernow Schmendimen and an idiot inventor introduce additional flourishes of humor. The final surprise patron to join the merriment at the Lapin Agile is a charismatic dark haired singer time warped in from a later era.

March 8 - 24, 2018

Everything in the Garden by Edward Albee

Director Ellise Mayor

In George Oppenheimer's words: "As always with Mr. Albee there is a theme beneath the surface, in this case the corruption of money and the rottenness of this bigoted exurbia where conformity to its illiberal standards and its hypocritical show of respectability is all that counts. The scene is the suburban home of Jenny and Richard. The only thing that seems to stand in the way of their happiness is a lack of money. The action starts in an entertaining comedy of manners style. Then abruptly there enters a Mrs. Toothe, the menacing and fascinating person who offers Jenny the opportunity to make more money than they have ever had, to buy a greenhouse and all the other luxuries that they require for their garden and their lives." What seems to be an easy solution rears it's head to a world of conflict and self interest.

May 3 - 19, 2018

The Diviners by Jim Leonard, Jr

Director Daniel Martin

This marvelously theatrical play is the story of a disturbed young man and his friendship with a disenchanted preacher in southern Indiana in the early 1930s. When the boy was young he almost drowned. This trauma, and the loss of his mother in the same accident, has left him deathly afraid of water. The preacher, set on breaking away from a long line of Kentucky family preachers, is determined not to do what he does best. He works as a mechanic for the boy's father. The town doesn't have a preacher and the women try to persuade him to preach - while he tries to persuade the child to wash. When the preacher finally gets the boy in the river and is washing him, the townspeople mistake the scene for a baptism. They descend on the event, and the confusion the boy drowns.

June 28 - July 14, 2018

Well

by Lisa Kron

Director David Strickland

"This play is not about my mother and me," begins the character of Lisa. But, of course, it is about her mother, and her mother's extraordinary ability to heal a changing neighborhood, despite her inability to heal herself. In this "solo show with people in it," Kron asks the provocative question: "Do we create our own illness?" The answers she gets are much more complicated than she bargained for as the play spins dangerously out of control into riotously funny and unexpected territory.

www.bftonline.org

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