American Theater Company artistic director Will Davis has revealed the lineup for ATC’s 2017–2018 season, the second slate to be programmed by Davis since his arrival in 2016. The three full productions include world premieres by Janine Nabers and Carlos Murillo and a Chicago premiere by Basil Kreimendahl.
Nabers’s Welcome to Jesus is a darkly comic Southern fable about the fictional small town of Hallelujah, Texas, where high-school football and Christ the King duke it out for residents’ highest reverence. Davis directs the production, running from October 26 to December 3.
In Kreimendahl’s We’re Gonna Be Okay, originally announced for the 2016–2017 season but pushed back, two families work through national and neighborly fear as the Cuban Missile Crisis looms. Kreimendahl workshopped their play with ATC and the Araca Group in 2015; Davis will replace Bonnie Metzgar at the helm for a run from January 25 to March 4.
Metzgar, who served as ATC’s interim artistic director before Davis’s tenure began, will instead direct Murillo’s Diagram of a Paper Airplane, about a playwright’s final work bringing together his former friends in the wake of his death. Though this is billed as a world premiere for Murillo, head of the BFA playwriting program at DePaul, Diagram has received numerous public readings and workshops since 2009 and is already published as the first part of a trilogy collected as The Javier Plays. It runs from May 3 to June 10.
ATC also will expand what it’s now calling the Chicago Open Residency Experiment, or CORE—weeklong residencies for works in development. The full list of CORE projects is below; the schedule remains to be announced.
Black Like Me
Adapted and directed by Monty Cole
Based on the book by John Howard Griffin
Kissing
Conceived by Abigail Boucher
Co-created by Abigail Boucher and Carolyn Defrin
With Brock Alter
Dig
By Theodore Germaine
Directed by Gina Marie Hayes
With Avi Roque
TBD Project
About Face Theatre
(saliva) things that i like about my partner that are not their mouth or genitals
By Jasmine Jordan and Valerie Gallucci
Show Boat
Music by Jerome Kern
Book and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
Based on the novel Show Boat by Edna Ferber
Directed by Jess McLeod
Join us for a week of experimenting with the size and scope of this beloved musical.
Any of my Enemies
Molly Brennan (Lead Artist)
Diagram of a Paper Airplane
By Carlos Murillo
Directed by Bonnie Metzgar
As part of their process leading up to production, Metzgar and Murillo will receive a CORE pre-production week to explore a key element(s) of the play.
To The Moon
Written by Beth Kander
Artistic collaborators: Allyce Torres, Amanda Long, Arian Thigpen, Sallee Murphy
La Ronde
A reimagining based on the play by Arthur Schnitzler
Directed by Dani Wieder
Choreography by Andy Slavin
FARMED: The Orwell Radio
A song-setting by Trevor Bachman
Inspired by George Orwell's Animal Farm
Soot & Linen
By BrittneyLove Smith
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