University of Washington School of Drama Announces 2017 - 2018 Mainstage Season

The University of Washington School of Drama, under the leadership of Executive Director Todd London, is pleased to announce the 2017 - 2018 season.

"As we started to think about this season, we found ourselves drawn over and over to plays that were set in contexts of ruin and devastation: the aftermath of the Trojan War in Trojan Women: A Love Story, a crumbling Brooklyn apartment in Goldie, Max and Milk, the physical and emotional rubble of the AIDS crisis in Perestroika," says Executive Director Todd London. "At the same time, we've been asking ourselves-and our students-what role art can play in times of upheaval and change. The answers that come back are timeless ones: art can bring us visions of beauty, truth, playfulness, and, maybe most important, love. Many of these plays pit those visions against man's destructive quest for power. We are grateful to be able to offer our students, and the larger Seattle community, the chance to come together around these stories of hope and resistance."

UW Drama is consistently ranked among the top theatre training programs in the country. Emerging actors, directors, designers, and performance scholars come from all over the globe to study with our world-class faculty and prominent guest artists. As an educational institution tasked with preparing the next generation of professional theatre artists, UW Drama is able to produce the type of plays that are harder and harder to find on regional stages: large-cast shows, period pieces with opulent, detailed designs, and boundary-pushing plays that are more difficult to pull off in a commercial theatre environment. We produce in three intimate spaces on the UW campus: The Hughes Penthouse Theatre (the first theatre-in-the-round ever built in the U.S.), The Jones Playhouse Theatre, and the Meany Studio Theatre.

ARTISTS & HIGHLIGHTS

New faculty member Tim Bond will direct our season opener, Lynn Nottage's By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. Tim is a graduate of UW Drama's MFA Directing program. Local audiences may remember Tim as one of the guiding forces behind Seattle's Group Theatre. He went on to spend eleven years as an Associate Artistic Director at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, followed by a nine-year tenure as Producing Artistic Director of Syracuse Stage and the Syracuse University Department of Drama. Tim is considered one of the foremost interpreters of the work of his late colleague, playwright August Wilson, having directed seven of the ten plays in Wilson's Century Cycle, including, most recently, Seattle Rep's productions of The Piano Lesson and Fences.

Second year MFA directors Amanda Friou and Cody Holliday Haefner will each direct a mainstage production this season, with Friou helming Caridad Svich's 12 Ophelias and Haefner directing Charles L. Mee's Trojan Women: A Love Story. Our highly competitive MFA directing program accepts only two students every other year, and its graduates, including Desdemona Chiang and Malika Oyetimein, are among the country's busiest emerging directors.

Playwright and UW Drama Senior Artist-in-Residence Karen Hartman will make her UW Drama debut with our season closer, Goldie, Max and Milk. Karen's play Roz + Ray was a smash hit last season at Seattle Rep, and this season national audiences will be treated to no fewer than six productions of Karen's plays all over the country.

Guest artists for this season include:

Mark Valdez, an L.A.-based director, educator, and organizer who has directed at Mixed Blood, Teatro Vision, The Rogue Artists, East West Players, and Cornerstone Theatre Company, where he served as Associate Artistic Director for five years. Mark Will direct our production of Angels in America Part Two: Perestroika, marking his UW Drama directing debut.

Allison Narver, an internationally acclaimed Seattle director whose long list of local directing credits includes work at Seattle Repertory Theatre (Sherlock Holmes, Boeing Boeing, Three Tall Women), 5th Avenue Theatre (Man of La Mancha), and ACT Theatre (The Mystery of Love & Sex). Nationally, Allison has directed at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre, RedCat, and Portland Center Stage, and at New York's Public Theatre, New Victory Theater, Ars Nova, Cherry Lane Theater, and others. She was the resident director of Julie Taymor's The Lion King, both on Broadway and in London, and is the former Artistic Director of Empty Space Theatre. She makes her UW Drama debut this season directing Senior-Artist-in-Residence Karen Hartman's Goldie, Max and Milk.

Samie Spring Detzer, artist, activist, and Artistic Director of Washington Ensemble Theatre. Samie is a graduate of Cornish College of the Arts, and has been seen at The Ensemble in Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., The Things are Against Us, The Hunchback of Seville, and The Edge of our Bodies. Around town, she has performed at Seattle Children's Theater, Theater Schmeater, Seattle Shakespeare Company, Book-It Repertory Theatre, Taproot, and others. Samie is the co-creator of The Ensemble's Six Pack Series, and is the Literary Executive Manager at ACT Theatre. Samie will direct our production of Lucy Thurber's Monstrosity, which is presented in partnership with Washington Ensemble Theatre.

Additionally, we will be joined throughout the year by our Mellon Creative Fellows: Playwright Erik Ehn, playwright/performer Daniel Alexander Jones, playwright/producer Meiyin Wang, and playwrights from New York's Ma-Yi Playwrights Lab, who are all working on long-term artistic research here at the University of Washington. Audiences will have the opportunity to view process presentations of our fellows' work (dates to be announced).

MAINSTAGE SEASON

FALL QUARTER

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark
By Lynn Nottage
Directed by Tim Bond, UW Drama faculty
October 27 - November 5
Previews October 24 & 26
Meany Studio Theatre, University of Washington

It's The Golden Age of Hollywood, and the streets of Los Angeles teem with aspiring starlets. When Vera Stark-maid to "America's Sweetie Pie," Gloria Mitchell-lands a groundbreaking role in an antebellum epic, she turns Hollywood on its head and paves the way for future generations of black actresses. Seventy years later, film buffs still wrestle with the life and legacy of this controversial star, for whom fame and fortune could only be achieved by joining the apparatus of a deeply racist industry. Hilarious and incisive, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage's screwball comedy is sly satire at its most urgent and satisfying.

Monstrosity
By Lucy Thurber
Directed by Samie Spring Detzer, guest director
Produced in partnership with Washington Ensemble Theatre
December 1 - 10
Previews November 28 & 30
Glenn Hughes Penthouse Theatre, University of Washington

When Tierney and Patrick's resistance-leading parents are murdered, the siblings are conscripted into a teenage fascist training camp run by their parents' killer. The camp's leader would like nothing better than to prove the virtue of his worldview by grooming the uniquely gifted Tierney as his successor. His daughter Sarah, however, is bent on subverting his plan, trying instead to draw Tierney into her effort to construct a more peaceful, loving social order within their war torn reality. Epic, disturbing, fantastical, massive, and meaty, Monstrosity is a retelling of the hero's tale where girls are the heroes, youth are the powerful, and a pair of magical, bicycle-riding twins whisper at our deepest, darkest impulses.

WINTER QUARTER

Trojan Women: A Love Story
By Charles L. Mee
Based on the works of Euripides and Berlioz
Directed by Cody Holliday Haefner, 2nd year MFA director
January 19 - 28
Previews January 16 & 18
Floyd and Delores Jones Playhouse Theatre, University of Washington

Playwright Charles L. Mee recruits "shards of our contemporary world to lie, as in a bed of ruins, within the frame of the classical world." In his brutal, lusty collage, Trojan Women: A Love Story, Dido reads Aeneas' tarot cards in a post-apocalyptic spa and Cassandra incarnates as a furious dominatrix. The war is ended, yet it is unceasing: "A world destroyed by the hands of those who thought themselves the creators of civilization." Love songs leaven war's ravages, and a feminist utopia glitters, unreachable, on the horizon.

12 Ophelias (a play with broken songs)
By Caridad Svich
Directed by Amanda Friou, 2nd year MFA director
Part of Seattle Celebrates Shakespeare Festival
February 16 - 25
Previews February 13 & 15
Glenn Hughes Penthouse Theatre, University of Washington

In a neo-Elizabethan Appalachia, Ophelia rises out of the water, dreaming of Pop-Tarts and imagining how things might have gone differently for her. Hamlet is here, as Rude Boy. Gertrude is a brothel madam, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern her androgynous helpers. Playwright Caridad Svich constructs a beguiling lyrical landscape out of broken desires and repaired ambitions.

SPRING QUARTER

Angels in America Part II: Perestroika
By Tony Kushner
Directed by Mark Valdez, guest director
April 27 - May 6
Previews April 24 & 26
Floyd and Delores Jones Playhouse Theatre, University of Washington

Part two of Tony Kushner's epic tale of AIDS in 1980s America begins in a ruined place where the old orders are splintering and everything-and everyone-has come apart. Prior Walter is a prophet, and now the "great work" of rebuilding this devastated world can begin. We meet characters who, having faced annihilation, must now confront their own stubborn indestructability. Profoundly funny, magnificently theatrical, and startlingly timely, Perestroika is a story about locating hope in the midst of chaos. The New York Times called it "a true millennial work of art, uplifting, hugely comic and pantheistically religious in a very American style."

Goldie, Max and Milk
By Karen Hartman, Senior Artist-in-Residence
Directed by Allison Narver, guest director
May 25 - June 3
Previews May 22 & 24
Glenn Hughes Penthouse Theatre, University of Washington

Max, a single lesbian, just gave birth. She's unemployed, with a house that's falling apart, an ex on the loose, and no clue how to nurse her newborn. Can Goldie, an Orthodox Jewish lactation consultant, guide Max into motherhood? Or will conflicting family values get the better of them both? Playwright and UW Drama Senior Artist-in-Residence Karen Hartman makes her UW Drama debut with this hilarious, surprising, and deeply human play. The Palm Beach New Times says, "No synopsis could adequately preview playwright Karen Hartman's wicked gift for language."

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