Julie Taymor, Michael Shannon and More Set for Theatre for a New Audience's 2013-14 Season

Theater for a New Audience has announced its 2013-2014 inaugural season, featuring A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, directed by Julie Taymor, KING LEAR, featuring Michael Pennington, and THE KILLER, starring Michael Shannon. Details below!

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

By William Shakespeare
Direction: Julie Taymor
Original Music: Elliot Goldenthal
Featuring Tina Benko as Titania, Max Casella as Bottom, David Harewood as Oberon, andKathryn Hunter as Puck

October 19, 2013 - January 12, 2014

Julie Taymor, Tony Award winner for direction of The Lion King, is an artist internationally acclaimed for her bold and original imagination. For our inaugural production, she stages Shakespeare's joyous comedy about the universal theme of love and its complications: lust, disappointment, confusion, marriage.

A Midsummer Night's Dream brilliantly conjoins four intertwined stories: the marriage of the Athenian Duke Theseus to the Amazon queen Hippolyta; the warring Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies; the madcap follies of four lovers in a forest; and the comically earnest efforts of a group of working men to stage a love-play for the royal wedding. Lysander loves Hermia, whose father wants her to marry Demetrius. Helena loves Demetrius, who chases the eloping Lysander and Hermia into the woods, pursued by Helena. They are all fair game for mischievous Puck, Oberon's servant, who scrambles their desires and Titania's. As the working men press faithfully on with their rehearsals, the otherworldly night of confusion, passion and diligence proves oddly momentous, touching every life to the quick.

Taymor's vision will be a fantasia of light and shadow. The stage will breathe with the miraculous charms and powerful illusions of love.

Julie Taymor is the first woman to win the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical, as well as a Tony for Best Costumes, for her production of The Lion King. She has directed four major films: Titus, Frida, Across the Universe and most recently, The Tempest. Her opera stagings include Elliot Goldenthal's Grendel and, for the Metropolitan Opera, Die Zauberflöte. At TFANA, she has directed Shakespeare's The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus and Carlo Gozzi's The Green Bird.

KING LEAR

By William Shakespeare
Direction: Arin Arbus
Featuring Michael Pennington

March 14 - May 4, 2014

Considered to be one of the greatest plays in the English language, King Lear tells the story of a savage familial power struggle that follows Lear's misguided decision to apportion his kingdom before his death.

For Arin Arbus, the play's taut intertwining of the political and the personal and its breathtaking power to distill an entire complex world into a story of two families is riveting. Moreover, she finds "its radical political assertions remarkable. Shakespeare challenges the very foundations of Western civilization, pointing out the absurdity of privilege, entitlement, social and economic hierarchies, and man's assertion of his power over nature."

Michael Pennington (Lear) has been acclaimed as Hamlet, Timon of Athens, Angelo and Berowne for the Royal Shakespeare Company; and as Coriolanus, Macbeth, Henry V and Richard II for The English Shakespeare Company, which he co-founded. He has played central roles in plays by authors such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinter, Stoppard and Mamet and last appeared in New York in Love Is My Sin, adapted and directed by Peter Brook and presented by TFANA.

Arin Arbus (Director) has staged at TFANA Shakespeare's Othello,Measure for Measure, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing. She recently staged Britten's The Rape of Lucretia at Houston Grand Opera and this fall will direct La Traviata at The Lyric Opera of Chicago.

THE KILLER

By Eugène Ionesco
Newly Translated: Michael Feingold
Direction: Darko Tresnjak
Featuring Michael Shannon

May 17-June 29, 2014

A searing and darkly funny parable about violence and resistance, Ionesco's The Killer premiered in Paris in 1959 and has become a modern classic of the Theatre of the Absurd. Berenger, Ionesco's cheerful, well-meaning everyman, discovers a "radiant city" near his dismal urban home, a perpetually sunny, impeccably clean place full of marvelous architecture and delicious food. The one hitch: a serial murderer has been brazenly killing people there for so long that the authorities have given up trying to catch him.

Oscar nominee (Revolutionary Road) Michael Shannon plays Berenger. Our production will bring out the humor and taut film noir aura of this work, underscoring the cinematic allure of the murders, the futile chase, the bungled investigation and the climactic confrontation with the criminal. The exquisitely simple approach will spotlight powerful, precise acting and spare, sculptural design.

Michael Shannon appears on stage, film and television. This season, he starred on Broadway in Grace. Additional theatre includes Uncle Vanya, Our Town, Mistakes Were Made, Bug and Killer Joe. He received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in Revolutionary Roadand plays Nelson Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire.

Darko Tresnjak is the Artistic Director of Hartford Stage. For TFANA, he directed All's Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Merchant of Venice featuring F. Murray Abraham as Shylock. His upcoming productions include La Dispute and Macbeth at Hartford Stage and A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, opening this fall at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride