Walden Theatre Announces 2010-11 Season

Walden Theatre, home of Louisville's nationally-recognized theatre conservatory for young people, announces a season that will take our audiences and our student actors from American and European classics through a range of modern masterpieces and recent works, all before finishing with three essentials by William Shakespeare.

The 2010-2011 Season is as follows:

Camino Real by Tennessee Williams
September 23 - October 2
Is it a condition, a nightmare, or just terra incognita? This daring and starkly-imagined play (rarely produced) fuses elements from history and literature with a deeply psychological and symbolic exploration of experience. "Make voyages! Attempt them! There's nothing else!"

The Learned Ladies by Molière
October 21-30
This French satire features young love, a mediocre poet, and pseudo-intellectual hypocrisy as two lovers are kept apart by a mother's misguided pretentiousness and the slick manipulations of a social climber.

The Disappearance of Daniel Hand by Dan O'Brien
November 11 - 20
Daniel disappeared, but the clues and impressions he left behind take his classmate, an aspiring filmmaker on an investigation into the heart of who he might have been. Is anyone really the person everyone takes them to be? (This is the second offering in Walden Theatre's Slant Culture Series of new, challenging plays that resonate to the lives of young people.)

To Kill a Mockingbird by Christopher Sergel, adapted from the book by Harper Lee
January 20 - 29
After a black man is accused of a terrible crime, lawyer Atticus Finch and his intrepid daughter Scout have to navigate the color lines drawn in a sleepy Alabama town to defend the accused and protect the townspeople from themselves. The book, a sensitive, bold look into a small town during the civil rights era, just celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Young Playwrights Festival 2011
February 10 - 12
Every spring, the best works by Walden Theatre's young playwrights are presented in this Festival of short plays performed by current Walden Theatre students. Past playwrights have gone on to write for the stage and film and have been published.

Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets
February 24 - March 5
Told in a series of separate vignettes, all framed by a meeting of taxi drivers debating about a strike, this play from the 1930s touches on issues surrounding the Great Depression like the wide distrust of big business from that time.

Young American Shakespeare Festival
May 12 - 22
Featuring three Shakespeare plays in repertory:

Othello
A general goes off to war with his wife and his military cohort, but dishonesty, jealously, and betrayal are on the horizon. Soon, he finds his world and everything in it is methodically, cruelly unmade by the machinations of a trusted companion.

Antony and Cleopatra
Love, honor, and might--with all the world for a stage. Brilliant general Antony has given himself over to the charms of Cleopatra and the languor of Egypt, even as events around the Roman world threaten a major military showdown as well as great personal tragedy.

Twelfth Night
Love is excessive, love is crazy, love is painful, and love is confusing. And love triangles don't get any more entertaining than in this comedy where a young woman impersonating a man is caught between a duke and a lady.

About Walden Theatre

Walden Theatre was created in 1976 to give young people the opportunity to grow and develop through the comprehensive study of theatre. Today Walden provides theatre education to 11,000 students annually through its nationally-renowned Conservatory and Outreach Programs, and creates more than 98 public performance opportunities for students - ranging from Shakespeare, Shaw, and Aesop to contemporary world-premiere productions and student-written plays. Its continuing success is built on respect for young people's enormous ability to learn and achieve, and grounded in its respect for theatre as a mirror on the world.