The Wilbury Theatre Group Announces 2017-18 Main Series Season

The 2017/18 Main Series Season includes Harold Pinter's groundbreaking The Caretaker, Branden Jacob-Jenkins' Neighbors, Young Jean Lee's Church, Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece The Skin of Our Teeth, Annie Baker's The Flick, and Sean Graney and Kevin O'Donnell's subversive new adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty.

In addition to this 6-Play Main Series Season, The Wilbury Group will be announcing 3 additional workshop and full-scale productions from our new works and experimental arm Studio W later this year, including a new adaptation of Alfred Jarry's absurdist masterpiece Ubu Roi adapted by Phoenyx Williams, our new works staged-reading series, and more.
Memberships for the 2017/18 season are $65-$135 and are available for purchase online at www.thewilburygroup.org/201718-Season, or by calling the box office at (401) 400-7100.

ABOUT THE PLAYS

THE CARETAKER by Harold Pinter
SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2017

Disturbed handyman Aston has invited an irascible tramp to stay with him at his brother's jumbled London flat. At first it seems that the manipulative guest will take advantage of his vulnerable host. But when Aston's brother Mick arrives, an enigmatic power struggle emerges between the three men that is in equal parts menacing, touching and darkly comic. When it premiered in 1960, The Caretaker changed the face of modern theatre, now Harold Pinter's groundbreaking classic comes to The Wilbury Group in a new production featuring beloved Rhode Island actor Richard Donnelly as the Caretaker.

NEIGHBORS by Branden Jacob-Jenkins

OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 2017

Have you seen the new neighbors? Classics professor Richard Patterson is not happy. The family of black entertainers that has moved in next door is an embarrassment-loud, raucous, tacky, and shameless. They're not just taking over the neighborhood-they're infiltrating his perfect, interracial family and his perfect, post-racial sanity. In its scathing exploration of denial and satire of black entertainment from minstrelsy to hip-hop, Neighbors is a shocking, explosive, and wildly theatrical play directed by acclaimed poet/performance artist Christopher Johnson (Invisible UpSouth) in it's Rhode Island premiere.

CHURCH by Young Jean Lee
DECEMBER 2017

Acclaimed playwright and director Young Jean Lee (Straight White Men) transforms a life-long struggle with organized religion into an exuberant church service. Both celebratory and confrontational, Church will test the expectations of religious and non-religious alike-looking deep into why we believe what we believe.

THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH by Thornton Wilder

JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2018

Completed by the author less than a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, The Skin of Our Teeth broke from established theatrical conventions and walked off with the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, and satire, and elements of the comic strip, Thornton Wilder depicts an Everyman Family as it narrowly escapes one end-of-the-world disaster after another, from Global Warming, to a new Ice Age, to war.

THE FLICK by Annie Baker

MARCH - APRIL 2018

In a run-down movie theater in central Massachusetts, three underpaid employees mop the floors and attend to one of the last 35 millimeter film projectors in the state. Their tiny battles and not-so-tiny heartbreaks play out in the empty aisles, becoming more gripping than the lackluster, second-run movies on screen. With keen insight and a finely-tuned comic eye, The Flick is a hilarious and heart-rending cry for authenticity in a fast-changing world.

THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE OR, THE SLAVE OF DUTY by Gilbert & Sullivan, wildly adapted by Sean Graney & Kevin O'Donnell

MAY - JUNE 2018

This subversive, loopy, and fantastically eccentric take on Gilbert and Sullivan's preposterous musical took audiences in Chicago by storm when presented by rebel theatre-makers The Hipocrites. Frederic was mistakenly apprenticed as a young boy to a band of sentimental pirates. Now 21, he falls head-over-heels for the Major-General's daughter and forswears the buccaneer's life forever, or so he thinks. This buoyant, award-winning Pirates of Penzance by Sean Graney and featuring just 10 actors (who also serve as the orchestra) is an irrevent and fresh homage to a world turned upside-down for Gilbert and Sullivan fans and would-be-haters alike.

Memberships for the 2017/18 season are $65-$135 and are available online at www.thewilburygroup.org, or by calling the box office at (401) 400-7100.

ABOUT THE WILBURY THEATRE GROUP
Founded in 2010, The Wilbury Group is an ever-evolving collaboration of artists committed to presenting adventurous audiences with the highest quality professional theatre. Founded on the belief that quality theatre should be an affordable and accessible means of enrichment to the community; The Wilburys present contemporary, experiential theatre that simultaneously engage, inspire, and provoke thought among audiences.

As the resident theatre company in the historic Trinity Square Theater at the Southside Cultural Center, The Wilbury Theatre Group is committed to providing our diverse and evolving community with affordable access to the performing arts through our Education program, public outreach programs, and professional productions of cutting-edge theatre from around the world.

The Wilbury Theatre Group is supported in part by The Avery Providence, The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, Revival Brewing Company, and the City of Providence Dept. of Art, Culture, & Tourism. www.thewilburygroup.org.

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