Interrobang Theatre Project today announced the lineup for its upcoming sixth season of "Unnatural Disasters," comprising three plays about how people deal with large-scale turmoil.
Katrina: Mother-in-Law of ’em All (September 6–October 5), by New Orleans playwright Rob Florence, is set in the real-life Mother-in-Law Lounge in that city's Treme neighborhood, where six individuals recount their tales of surviving the devastating 2005 hurricane. It will be staged by Interrobang's new co-artistic director, Georgette Verdin.
Verdin also helms the season's second entry, Craig Wright's Recent Tragic Events (March 13–April 10). The 2002 play concerns a couple set up for a blind date on September 12, 2001, and the nature of coincidence and free will; it also features as a character the novelist Joyce Carol Oates played by a sock puppet. It was last seen in Chicago in a splendid 2005 staging by the now-defunct Uma Productions.
Interrobang's other co-artistic director, James Yost, will direct the season ender, Rajiv Joseph's The North Pool (May 29–June 26). The 2011 two-hander by the author of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is a face-off between an Arab-American high school student and the vice principal who's detained him after school for unclear reasons. Katrina will be staged at the Den Theatre, while the latter two plays will go up at the Athenaeum.