Firehouse Theatre Announces Upcoming 09/10 Season

Founding Artistic Director Carol Piersol announces the exciting new lineup for the Firehouse Theatre Project's upcoming 2009-2010 season, beginning this fall.

In the coming season, The Firehouse presents four brilliant playwrights new to the Firehouse stage: three who are well established (Howard Korder, Neil LaBute and Eric Bogosian), and one bright new rising star (Sheila Callaghan) whose play will be part of the statewide Minds Wide Open program featuring Women in the Arts.

Tickets to individual shows are not yet available, so buy your season tickets today, save some hard-earned moolah, and get first dibbies on favorite nights and seats, in advance.

Check out these great plays coming to your favorite theatre on Broad Street: Boys' Life by Howard Korder, opening September 10, 2009. This Is How It Goes by Neil LaBute, opening October 29, 2009. Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) by Sheila Callaghan, opening February 25, 2010. Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll by Eric Bogosian, opening April 15, 2010.

Remember your late twenties? Boys were definitely still boys and men were - well, not quite men. BOYS' LIFE by Howard Korder tracks the misadventures of three former college mates as they simultaneously pursue and refuse adulthood; and the women who are both attracted to and repelled by their bewitching mix of charm and treachery.

Playwright and screen writer Howard Korder was born in New York City and won a 1996 Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting. Winner of numerous awards for his work, Korder received an Obie award for his play, The Lights. Boys' Life received a Pulitzer-Prize nomination after its debut at Lincoln Center in 1988, directed by William H. Macy. Korder's other plays include Search and Destroy; Fun; Nobody; Night Maneuver; and The Hollow Lands.

Formerly high-school sweethearts, Belinda and Cody Phipps appear to be the typical middle-class, interracial success story. When another classmate returns to town, their seemingly amicable reunion devolves into a triangle of bigotry and betrayal. Staged on continually shifting moral ground that challenges our notions about gender, ethnicity, and even love itself, THIS IS HOW IT GOES by Neil LaBute unblinkingly explores the myriad ways in which the wild card of race is played by both black and white in America.

Playwright Neil LaBute successfully made the transition to feature films with his debut In the Company of Men, a dark comedy that explores sexual and corporate politics and which went on to win the Filmmaker's Trophy as Best Dramatic Feature at 1997's Sundance Film Festival. He continues to combine intriguing moral and ethical metaphors with dark portraits of American life with the films Your Friends & Neighbors, Nurse Betty and The Shape of Things.

Blurring the lines between Mother and those needing mothering, CRUMBLE (LAY ME DOWN, Justin Timberlake) by Sheila Callaghan tells the story of eleven-year old Janice, whose father has recently died, and her devastated mom, who trusts in superior baking skills as the key to healing. While her mother fires up the oven and dreams of Harrison Ford, Janice dreams of Justin Timberlake and compiles a very strange, very explosive Christmas-wish list. Toss a crumbling, mercurial apartment into the mix, and the road to redemption is a twisted one, indeed.

Sheila Callaghan's plays have been produced and developed with Soho Rep, Playwright's Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Clubbed Thumb, The LARK, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, New Georges, and Moving Arts, among others. She is the recipient of the Princess Grace Award for emerging artists, a Jerome Fellowship from the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis, a MacDowell Residency, a 2005 Cherry Lane Mentorship Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, and the prestigious Whiting Award. Her full-length plays include Scab; Crawl Fade to White; Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake); We Are Not These Hands; and Dead City.

An Obie-award winning series of eleven monologues by the loquacious and satirical Bogosian (Talk Radio), the one-man show SEX, DRUGS, ROCK & ROLL by Eric Bogosian portrays a funny, yet bleak, landscape of the Western world. Through such recognizable characters as a cerebral panhandler; a socially conscious rock star; an aging environmentalist; and a dropout from the 60's, SDR&R pokes fun at the excesses and absurdities of a generation weaned on rock 'n' roll.

Eric Bogosian is the author of two plays, Talk Radio and Suburbia as well as three Obie-award winning solos: Drinking In America; Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; and Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead. He is best known for starring as the misanthropic radio "shock-jock" Barry Champlain in Oliver Stone's film version of his own Talk Radio (for which he received the Berlin Film Festival's "Silver Bear"). Bogosian's plays and solos have been staged around the world.

Season subscriptions for the 2009-2010 season are available for $85 adult/$75 seniors (65+) - a $15 savings over single-ticket purchase. Call 804-355-2001 (box office) to reserve by phone.

Individual tickets will be made available later this summer (prices: $25 adult; $22 seniors; $10 students with valid I.D.). Get 'em while they're hot!

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.