TimeLine Theatre Company, known for producing works that engage with the historical, has announced the lineup for its 2016–17 season—during which TimeLine will mark its 20th anniversary.
As it has for the last several years, TimeLine will open its season offsite, at Stage 773, with the Chicago premiere of Bakersfield Mist, a comedy by Stephen Sachs about a trailer-park resident who's convinced the thrift store painting she bought for a few bucks is an original Jackson Pollock, and the art expert she invites to inspect the work. Kevin Christopher Fox will direct the two-hander, featuring Janet Ulrich Brooks and Mike Nussbaum (August–October).
Back at TimeLine's home base, Nick Bowling will stage the U.S. premiere of The Last Wife, a contemporary retelling of the relationship between Henry VIII and his sixth wife, Katharine Parr. Kate Hennig's play debuted at Canada's Stratford Festival last summer (September–December).
Bowling will also helm the Chicago premiere of A Disappearing Number, a 2007 work devised by the British theater company Complicité that explores mathematics and human connection in a series of vignettes set both in the present and a century earlier (January –April).
Finally, TimeLine returns to playwright Dominique Morisseau, whose Sunset Baby is currently running at the theater, with her Paradise Blue, an ensemble drama set in a faltering Detroit jazz club in 1949. Ron OJ Parson, who directed both Sunset Baby and the third play in Morisseau's Detroit trilogy, Detroit ’67, at Northlight Theatre, will helm Paradise Blue as well (May–July).
