The Gift Theatre, the Jefferson Park storefront that bills itself as the city’s smallest Equity theater, has set a lineup of three new plays by Mona Mansour, Claire Kiechel and Janine Nabers for its 2017 season.
In Mansour’s Unseen (February 10–April 19), a conflict photographer wakes up in the Istanbul apartment of her sometimes girlfriend with no memory of what happened to her in the field. The arrival of the photographer’s mother from California complicates matters further; Gift ensemble member Maureen Payne Hahner will direct.
Pilgrims (June 2–July 30), by New York–based playwright Kiechel, concerns a man and woman confined long-term in the same small space on a spacefaring mission. A 2016 entry on the Kilroys’ “The List” of worthy, unproduced plays by women, Pilgrims will be codirected by Gift artistic director Michael Patrick Thornton and Jessica Thebus, director of the Gift’s recent Richard III.
Nabers’s A Swell in the Ground (October 13–December 10), to be directed by guest artist Chika Ike, is a nonlinear recounting of the relationships among four college friends over nearly two decades. Nabers’s Annie Bosh Is Missing had a developmental production in Steppenwolf’s First Look series in 2013.
The year will begin as usual with TEN (January 5–15), a collection of new ten-minute plays. The Gift’s 2016 season continues with Erica Weiss’s rich staging of The Grapes of Wrath, now through August 14, followed by the world premiere of Melissa Ross’s A Life Extra Ordinary (September 29–November 30).