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The Hypocrites announce 20th anniversary season

Written by
Kris Vire
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The Hypocrites, led by artistic director Sean Graney, today announced a rather surprising five-play slate for the 2016–17 season, the company's 20th, entirely free of the well-known titles the company is often known for putting its own twist on.

The season opens with the Chicago premiere of You On the Moors Now, a 2015 comedy by New York playwright Jaclyn Backhaus that has characters from Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Little Women banding together to escape their period's social constraints; Devon de Mayo directs (September 9–October 30).

For the holidays, the Hypocrites premiere Cinderella at the Theater of Potatoes, a fairy-tale adaptation by Andra Velis Simon of the opera Cendrillon and other works by composer Pauline Viardot-García; it will be staged by Graney in the vein of the Hypocrites' Gilbert & Sullivan operettas (November 12–January 8).

Director Marti Lyons will helm a staging of Wit, Margaret Edson's 1999 Pulitzer Prize–winning play about an English professor facing terminal illness (January 20–March 12). That's followed by a new production of The House of Martin Guerre, a musical by Canadian composer Leslie Arden and writer Anna Theresa Cascio about a man who returns from self-imposed exile but is suspected by some of being an imposter, previously staged at the Goodman Theatre in 1996; the Hypocrites' version will be directed by Geoff Button (February 18–April 2).

Jess McLeod will direct the final production of the season, Lynn Nottage's 2002 play Las Meninas, about a romance between Louis XIV's queen, Marie-Therese, and an African dwarf presented to her as a gift (March 24–May 21). Four of the five shows will be presented at the Den Theatre, with Martin Guerre at Stage 773. The Hypocrites also announced the company's first-ever new play commissions, for writers Lavina Jadhwani and Rohina Malik. The Hypocrites' latest production, Adding Machine: A Musical, opened last night at the Den.

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