Victory Gardens Theater today announced the lineup for its 2017–18 season, to open with the first local production of the Tony Award–winning musical Fun Home.
The musical, based on the graphic memoir by MacArthur “genius” grantee Alison Bechdel and adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, will be directed by Gary Griffin. It’s the first full-on musical for Victory Gardens since Chay Yew became artistic director in 2011. Also unusually, Victory Gardens’s production will open less than a year after the show’s Broadway production appeared in Chicago on tour in November. Fun Home will run September 19 to November 12.
Also on tap for VG is the Chicago premiere of Fade, the newest play by Chicago expat Tanya Saracho. The two-hander about a Mexican-born TV writer and her relationship with the studio’s Mexican-American janitor was commissioned by Denver Center Theater, where it premiered in 2016; its Off Broadway premiere, produced by Primary Stages, just ended its run in New York on Sunday. Victory Gardens will coproduce with Teatro Vista, with Sandra Marquez directing (Nov 4–Dec 23).
Lisa Portes will helm Breach: a manifesto on race in america through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate, a world premiere coming-of-age story by New York–based writer Antoinette Nwandu that was developed through Victory Gardens’s IGNITION Festival (Feb 9–Mar 11). Yew will direct another world premiere, Boo Killebrew’s Doing It, about a woman trying to restart her life following a prison stint (Apr 6–May 6). Finally, Dexter Bullard will stage the Chicago premiere of Mies Julie, a South African–set adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie by Yaël Farber (May 25–June 24).
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