Ensemble Theatre's 33rd Season to Include THE NORMAL HEART and More

Ensemble Theatre announces its 33rd consecutive season, dubbed "Discover The HUMAN Element." This season's selection of plays will explore the fundamentals of the human experience.

Ensemble will embark on its second season in its new SPACE with Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart". WINNER of numerous Tony Awards ® in 2011 including "Best Revival of a Play", "The Normal Heart" unfolds like a real-life political thriller-as a tight-knit group of friends refuse to let doctors, politicians and the press bury the truth of an unspoken epidemic behind a wall of silence. A quarter-century after it was written, this outrageous, unflinching, and totally unforgettable look at the sexual politics of New York during the AIDS crisis remains one of the theatre's most powerful evenings ever. Directed by Sarah May, "The Normal Heart" will open Friday, September 28th and runs through Sunday, October 21st. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm. There will be numerous surrounding activities and talkbacks inspired by the topics that are addressed in this classic but still very relevant piece.

It's three days before Christmas. While wrapping gifts, an obsessive-compulsive kindergarten teacher receives jarring news from a stranger setting off a series of events involving missing relatives, a drunken drag queen, broken hearts, Bette Davis movies, mistaken identities, Midrashic parables and why Jesus is having a really bad day. In short, everything you might not expect in a heart-warming holiday story. Nonetheless, a holiday COMEDY not to be missed! Written by Jonathan Wilhelm, "Miracle and Wonder" was discovered through Ensemble's "Stage Wrights" workshop. This will be a WORLD PREMIERE by a Cleveland Playwright! Opening Thursday November 15th and running through Sunday December 2nd, "Miracle and Wonder" will perform Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays @8pm and Sundays at 2pm. (There will be no performance on Thanksgiving Thursday the 22nd).

Recipient of the 2004 Jeff Award for Best New Work for his "Free Man of Color", part of our critically acclaimed 10'-11' season, Ensemble will again present Cleveland audiences with the masterful work of Charles Smith. Based on real events, "The Gospel According to James" is set in 1930. James Cameron and Mary Ball emerge as the sole survivors of racial crimes in Marion, Indiana. Teenagers when the crimes occurred, they look back on those events and their lives in this work commissioned by the Indiana Repertory Theatre. As their past and present lives intermingle, Cameron and Ball discover that their remembrances of that day differ even if their experiences were the same – challenging us all to wrestle with the tensions between memory, history and redemption. Directed by Ensemble Artistic Director, Celeste Cosentino, "The Gospel According to James" opens Friday January 25th and runs through Sunday February 17th, 2013. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm. There will be student matinees as well as talkbacks and events scheduled surrounding the topics in this production.

Celebrating a very successful inaugural year in 2012 and entering into its second season, "The Colombi New Plays Festival", will again present a platform for local playwrights to see productions of their works. These are scripts that are developed in the Ensemble "Stage Wrights" workshop which assembles weekly. The scripts for this year's festival will be chosen and announced soon! Productions of the scripts chosen will run March 7th through March 24th. Performances will be Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays @2pm.

To conclude this "ambitious" 2012-2013 season, Ensemble will present Eugene O'Neill's American Classic "The Iceman Cometh" currently playing to a SOLD OUT RUN at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. This epic play "welcomes the audience to Harry Hope's saloon, home to a ragtag band of drunks and dreamers who celebrate the arrival of Hickey, the charismatic traveling salesman whose raucous presence always ensures a grand good time. But when a newly sober Hickey blows in with a renewed outlook on life, his zealous attempts to fix the lives of his old friends lead to a series of events that are at once devastatingly comic and heartbreaking-and culminate with a revelation that threatens to shatter the tenuous illusions that fuel their lives." (Chicago Sun-Times). Directed by Ian Hinz, "The Iceman Cometh" will open Friday April 19th and run through Sunday May 12th. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 7pm and Sundays at 2pm.
(7pm curtains times are ONLY for "The Iceman Cometh")

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