Interrobang Theatre Project has announced programming for the company’s eighth season, to be presented in residence at the Athenaeum Theatre. The three plays include a Midwest premiere by English playwright Dawn King, a recent work by veteran scribe Lee Blessing and a new production of a moving piece by Craig Wright. All three, according to Interrobang’s co-artistic directors James Yost and Georgette Verdin, speak to the same question: What is truth?
King’s play, Foxfinder, opens the season with a dystopian tale a near-future England wracked by blight and hunger, in which foxes have become symbols of terror. Reviewing the play’s premiere at London’s Finborough Theatre, Time Out London called it “a thrillingly original piece of writing, eliding the historical with the futuristic, evoking all manner of religious and sectarian tensions and chillingly suggesting how, when authority rests upon faith rather than reason, the consequences can be deadly.” Interrobang literary manager Margaret Knapp directs the Chicago production, running September 28 to November 5.
Yost will stage Blessings’s For the Loyal, a 2015 piece inspired by the Penn State sexual abuse coverup, in which the wife of an assistant coach ends up taking on a college football program inclined to protect its own. It will have a winter run, with dates to be determined.
Verdin will direct Wright’s Grace, about an evangelical Christian couple whose faith is impacted by the grieving widower next door. Of the play’s original Chicago production, which starred Michael Shannon, Mike Nussbaum, Chaon Cross and Steve Key at Northlight Theatre in 2006, Time Out Chicago’s Novid Parsi wrote that “Wright makes genuinely thought-provoking observations about fundamentalists’ staunch belief not only in a God, but in a God that’s just and rational—in a world that’s patently neither.” Grace runs May 3 to June 3.
Three Interrobang Theatre Project productions—The North Pool, The Amish Project and Falling—are nominated in various categories at tonight’s 44th annual Non-Equity Joseph Jefferson Awards.
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