World Premiere Comedy Highlights Chenango River Theatre's 2019 Season

The greater Binghamton area's only professional, non-profit Equity theatre, Chenango River Theatre, will open their 2019 season on May 24 with a new play that is currently the most frequently produced play in the country, A Doll's House, Part 2. Following that production is the World Premiere of a new comedy about an Irish Catholic family in 1973, Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The Immigrant, based on the true story of the author's own family who became the only Jewish family in town when they immigrated to Hamilton, Texas in 1909, runs in the late summer slot. The season finale will be The Sea Horse, an unusual and volatile love story set in a dumpy waterfront bar of the same name.

All four of the shows will be new to audiences in this area. Due to ticket demand last season, CRT is adding an additional matinee to all shows. Opening weekends will now feature a Saturday matinee at 2pm.

Also new this season will be FREE tickets to high school and full-time college students. Up to 8 seats will be available at no charge for any Thursday/Friday/Saturday performance (except opening nights). This initiative is designed to remove cost as a barrier for younger audiences being able to experience professional theatre.

A DOLL'S HOUSE, PART 2, By Lucas Hnath

No. You don't need to have seen the original.

May 24 - June 16, Directed by Kiara Pipino (SUNY Oneonta)

Co-Produced by NBT Bank, IBM, and Davidson Fox & Co./Jim & Beth Daniels.

In the final scene of Henrik Ibsen's 1879 groundbreaking masterwork, Nora makes the shocking decision to leave her husband and children, and begin a life on her own. This climactic event - when Nora slams the door on everything in her life to become her own woman - instantly propelled world drama into the modern age. Now 15 years have passed. And there's a knock on the door. Nora has returned. But why? Not so much a sequel to Ibsen's feminist groundbreaker of 1879 as it is a heartfelt meditation on how far we've come in the century and a quarter since.

INCIDENT AT OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HELP, By Katie Forgette (World Premiere)

July 5 - 28, Directed by Drew Kahl (SUNY Oneonta)

Co-Produced by NBT Bank and Davidson Fox & Co. with Jim & Beth Daniels.

The play tells the story of the O'Shea's, a cash-challenged, Irish-Catholic family just trying to get through 1973. Linda O'Shea, our 19-year old narrator, is attempting to re-enact for the audience the most turbulent day of her life, her own, very personal Saturday Night Massacre...but her family keeps interrupting, insisting on telling their side of the story. The 1970s was a time of old school living. No Facebook, no tweets, no texting, no Skype. A time when public ridicule in a close-knit, hermetically sealed Catholic parish was the ultimate nightmare. When Linda's parents leave it to Linda to tell her younger sister about the birds and the bees, the bawdy conversation is somehow overheard by the parish priest...and Father Lovett is not amused. He sets out to confront the family about "the corruption of their eldest daughter's soul."

THE IMMIGRANT, By Mark Harelik

August 16 - September 8, Directed by Karla Hartley (Stageworks, Tampa, FL)

Co-Produced by Raymond Corporation and Anonymous.

Rural Central Texas, 1909. A young Russian-Jewish immigrant, newly arrived in America through the port of Galveston, Texas, pulls his banana cart into the hamlet of Hamilton. Fleeing the vicious pogroms of his homeland, he has sought refuge in the land of the free. Able to speak only Yiddish, alone in the midst of a staunchly Christian community, he begs for shelter. Over the next 30 years, he makes a home and raises a family in this tiny town. It's the story of a young Russian-Jewish couple and the local couple that take them in, as religion meets religion, culture meets culture, fear meets fear, and love meets love. This is the true story of Haskell Harelik, "the immigrant."

THE SEA HORSE, By Edward Moore

September 27 - October 13, Directed by Bill Lelbach (Artistic & Managing Director, CRT)

Co-Produced by Edward Jones Investments (Greene NY).

Originally produced at New York's Circle Rep, this tender, ribald, and complex love story is set in a waterfront bar where seaman Harry Bales spends his shore leave. "The Sea Horse" is run by Gertrude Blum, with whom Harry enjoys a purely physical relationship; they have never shared their private yearnings. Gertrude has encased her heart behind a facade of toughness following a failed marriage. Now Harry has a dream; he wants to buy a charter fishing boat and to have a son. The play progresses through a ritual courtship as these two outwardly abrasive characters fight, make up, fight again, spin dreams, deflate them, make love and reveal their locked up secrets.

Season tickets start as low as $80 to see all four of the shows. Season tickets are available starting April 1 online at www.chenangorivertheatre.org, using any credit card or PayPal. Individual tickets to specific shows will go on sale April 22. Season tickets can also be purchased by calling the box office starting April 1: 607-656-8499.

Chenango River Theatre's intimate, air-conditioned 99 seat theatre is just 15 minutes north of Binghamton at 991 State Highway 12, Greene, NY. CRT operates under annual contract with Actors' Equity Association, the national association for professional actors and stage managers in the United States - the same actors you see on television, in film and at major theatres across the country.

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