Woolly Mammoth Sets 2015-16 Season: WINNERS AND LOSERS, 'WOMEN LAUGHING ALONE' & More

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company has announced its 2015-2016 season, featuring a world premiere as well as new plays receiving their Washington area premieres after garnering accolades from performances in New York, Los Angeles, and London including the Laurents/Hatcher Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Obie Award for Best New American Play. Woolly's new season features the work of Sheila Callaghan, Jennifer Haley, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Rajiv Joseph, the Chicago Neo-Futurists and Canadian duo Marcus Youssef and James Long.

Woolly's 2015-2016 season will grapple with urgent questions revolving around beauty, power and desire: where do our images of feminine beauty come from and who controls them? Who are the artisans who create beautiful things, and who owns their creations? Will the technology of the future let us freely pursue our darkest sexual desires? Will we ever be allowed to cross barriers of color and crawl inside the skin of the Other?

With the world premiere production of Sheila Callaghan's Women Laughing Alone with Salad, Woolly's new season delivers a powerful critique of our image-obsessed culture right from the start. The production will feature Company Member Kimberly Gilbert, and will serve as Woolly's contribution to DC's inaugural Women's Voices Theatre Festival*, taking place in fall 2015.

Canada's Marcus Youssef and James Long come to DC for the season's next offering, Winners and Losers, a two-man theatrical drinking game that slowly reveals itself as a dangerous unpacking of privilege, status symbols, and class divisions. In December, Woolly has invited The Chicago Neo-Futurists back to perform Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, their hilarious and harrowing 60 minute mini-play extravaganza, as this year's Holiday Special.

To kick off 2016, the playwright/director pair of Rajiv Joseph and John Vreeke (Gruesome Playground Injuries) returns to Woolly with Joseph's latest play Guards at the Taj, a tragicomic fable about beauty, responsibility, and friendship in 17th century India. In April 2016 Woolly will host dystopian modern crime drama The Nether, winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which will feature local actor Ed Gero as well as Company Members Tim Getman, Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey, and Jared Mezzocchi (multimedia design).

Woolly will welcome back the work of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate) for the final production of the 2015-2016 season, An Octoroon: an Obie Award-winning adaptation of a 19th century melodrama, part period satire, part provocative indictment of racial pigeonholing.

"We are delighted to welcome many of our favorite artists along with exceptional Woolly newcomers for this exciting new season," says Woolly Mammoth Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz. "Hilariously uncensored verbal sparring, imaginative leaps through the past and future, emotional twists that tug at your insides, politically incorrect provocations that crash through taboo barriers-these are just a few elements of Woolly Mammoth's 36th season, our most wildly theatrical and daring collection of plays to date."

* The Women's Voices Theater Festival, which boasts participation from more than 50 theaters throughout the Nation's Capital region, is dedicated to featuring new work by female playwrights and highlighting the scope of plays being written by women.

Subscriptions for the 2015-2016 season are available now by calling the Box Office at 202-393-3939, or stopping in person at 641 D Street, NW (7th & D). Subscriptions will be available for purchase online at www.woollymammoth.net in coming weeks. Single tickets will go on sale summer 2015, date to be announced.

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