Azuka Theatre to Include SKIN AND BONE, TIGERS BE STILL & More in 2013-14 Season

Azuka Theatre's 14th Season will take audiences on a New York City subway ride, a tiger hunt through suburbia and back to a small northern Florida town that might seem eerily familiar. The season opens with the Philadelphia Premiere of Dutch Masters by Greg Keller. Then it continues with the World Premiere of Jacqueline Goldfinger's Skin & Bone, the second part of a trilogy she started with the terrible girls. The season concludes with the Philadelphia Premiere of Tigers Be Still by Kim Rosenstock. Azuka will also bring back the I Love You, I Hate You Happy Hour - an annual Valentine's Day event that now runs two nights and the tenth year of the Spotlight Series, a week of readings featuring plays and playwrights under consideration for future Azuka seasons. Subscriptions range in price from $45-$60. Subscriptions go on sale July 1 and individual tickets go on sale August 1.All shows are performed at the Off Broad Street Theater at 1636 Sansom Street. Subscriptions and more information are available at www.azukatheatre.org.

Azuka's season opens with an insightful comedy-drama that takes a frank and deeply human look at the racial divide in the United States. In Dutch Masters by Greg Keller, a young white man and a young black man meet on a D train to the Bronx and strike up a conversation. It's 1992. Los Angeles is still smoldering, the Crown Heights riots are a recent memory, and this chance encounter leads these two young men into a head-on confrontation in a story that goes from Rockefeller Center to 145th St and everywhere in between. The show is set to run during the 2013 Fringe Arts Festival September 11 - 22, 2013; Opening Night is Saturday, September 14 at 7 p.m. Azuka Theatre's Producing Artistic Director Kevin Glaccum directs this astute and sharp new piece of theatre.

The season continues with the World Premiere of Barrymore Award winner Jacqueline Goldfinger's Skin & Bone, the second play in Goldfinger's trilogy of contemporary Southern Gothic plays. In this new piece, audiences meet aging sisters Midge and Madge, who run a broken down bed and breakfast that has a date with the wrecking ball. When a young woman appears, searching for clues about a former guest, a storm of memories begins to brew and all three women stumble down a dark and dusty road of a past better left hidden. With this show, audiences return to the quiet creepiness of the small North Florida town they were introduced to in Azuka's 2011 World Premiere, the terrible girls. Directed by Artistic Associate (and terrible girls director) Allison Heishman, the cast includes Drucie McDaniel, Amanda Schoonover, and Maureen Torsney-Weir. The show runs March 5-March 23, 2014. The show opens Saturday, March 8 at 7 p.m.

The season closes with the Philadelphia premiere of Kim Rosenstock's Tigers Be Still. This quirky, endearing and deliciously dark new comedy, received critical acclaimed in its 2010 New York premiere. In this play, Sherry finds herself unemployed, overwhelmed and hiding out in her childhood house, but when she gets hired as a substitute art teacher, things begin to look up. Now, if only her mother would get out of bed, her sister would stop stealing her former fiancé's knick-knacks, her first therapy patient would do his homework, her new boss would leave his gun at home, and someone would catch the tiger that has escaped from the zoo and wreaking havoc on her suburban town, everything would be just perfect. Also directed by Kevin Glaccum, this show runs May 7 - 25, 2014; Opening Night is Saturday, May 10 at 7 p.m.

The season will also see the return of Azuka's annual cult hit I Love You, I Hate You. By popular demand this annual fundraiser has been expanded to two evenings, February 9 and 10, 2014 at a location to be announced. Culled from the Philadelphia City Paper's iconic I Love You, I Hate You column this one of a kind Valentine's Day event celebrates all things love and hate in a uniquely Philadelphia way. With I Love You, I Hate You columns read aloud by some of the city's funniest performers, this is a hilarious evening of brotherly love and melodramatic hate.

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