Lorraine Hansberry News

Artistic Director Braden Abraham today announced Seattle Repertory Theatre's 2016-2017 Season. The season is headlined by the electrifying musical Here Lies Love from David Byrne (Talking Heads) and Fatboy Slim, a new production ofthe award-winning Broadway smash King Charles III, and the timeless classic A Raisin in the Sun. The season runs from September 2016 through May 2017, and subscriptions are available now through the Seattle Rep Box Office at (206) 443-2222, as well as online at SeattleRep.org. Single tickets will go on sale this fall.

Goodman Theatre, under the leadership of Artistic Director Robert Falls and Executive Director Roche Schulfer, becomes the first Chicago theater to establish a facility dedicated to education and engagement programs next when it opens the new Alice Rapoport Center for Education and Engagement ('the Alice') next month.

Goodman Theatre presents The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window by Lorraine Hansberry, the famed author of A RAISIN IN THE SUN is one of Chicago's first great playwrights. Obie Award winner Anne Kauffman directsthis major revival of premiered on Broadway just three months before her untimely death in 1965 at age 34.

In conjunction with a production of playwright Lorraine Hansberry's final work, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Goodman Theatre presents a Lorraine Hansberry Celebration (April 30 - June 5), curated by Goodman Resident Director Chuck Smith.

Morisseau's explanation of the Detroit riots makes a lot of sense, and resonates with my understanding of what happened last year in Baltimore. Morisseau's thesis is that the black citizens of Detroit were not crazy, just reacting to an ongoing culture of police abuse, and that abusive police and military responses were to blame for most of what went wrong once the spark of protest had been struck by the raid of an unlicensed after-hours drinking club known as a 'blind pig.'

Black Ensemble Theater announces its 11th annual Black Playwrights Festival, April 24-27, 2016, as part of the company's Black Playwrights Initiative (BPI). 

San Francisco Playhouse continues its thirteenth Mainstage season with the West Coast premiere of Lolita Chakrabarti's biographical play Red Velvet, directed by Margo Hall.

The annual Playwrights for a Cause benefit will be Sunday, July 24th at 7:30 pm at the Atlantic Theatre (Linda Gross Theater), 336 West 20th Street, NYC 10011. The special performance will include six original plays. This year the playwrights for the benefit will include: Israel Horovitz, Dominique Morisseau, Antoinette Nwandu, John Patrick Shanley, Regina Taylor as well as an award-winning writer from the Planet Connections community that will be announced later.

History Matters/Back To The Future, committed to promoting the study and production of women's plays of the past, has announced the winner of the second annual Judith Barlow Prize. Lindsay Adams, a student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., has been chosen for her one-act play, HER OWN DEVICES, which was inspired by Mary Chase's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Harvey.

PlayPenn, Philadelphia's nationally recognized professional new play development organization, will hold its 12th annual New Play Development Conference from July 5 - July 24 in Philadelphia at The Drake, a new home for new plays. The Conference, including three weeks of intensive work on six works-in-progress, will offer staged readings open to the public. The six selected plays and playwrights are:

It's only appropriate that Tommy, who's committed to diversity and an int'l perspective in theater, is helming an Africa-set play that's Broadway's first ever whose writer, director and cast are all black women.

Cleveland Play House's New Ground Theatre Festival (NGTF) is breaking new ground once again, with four extraordinary works by some of America's hottest playwrights.

Contra Costa Civic Theatre (CCCT) continues its 56th season with The Mountaintop, Katori Hall's daring reimagining of a seminal event in American history, directed by CCCT Artistic Director Marilyn Langbehn. The Mountaintop plays from April 15 through May 8- performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays at 2pm at the theatre.

Artistic and Executive Director, Roy Surette, assures that theatre lovers will be SWEPT AWAY by Centaur Theatre's 48th season.

Master playwright David Ives (Venus in Fur, All in the Timing) reinvigorates Jean-Francois Regnard's 1708 comedy about greed, love, and intrigue in Aurora's Bay Area Premiere of THE HEIR APPARENT. Josh Costello (Detroit, Wittenberg) helms THE HEIR APPARENT, featuring Julian Lopez-Morillas, Kenny Toll, Patrick Kelly Jones, Elizabeth Carter, Lawrence Radecker, Khalia Davis, and Katie Rubin. THE HEIR APPARENT plays April 15 through May 15 at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley. For tickets ($32-50) and information the public can call (510) 843-4822 or visit auroratheatre.org.

Kauffman's deft hand with the quirky work of contemporary playwrights has earned her awards in NY and regionally.

Park Square's 2016-2017 season promises to showcase Park Square at its inclusive best:

Steppenwolf Theatre Company announced today the 2016/17 Season, the first to be curated by Artistic Director Anna D. Shapiro and the Steppenwolf artistic team. The new season brings many exciting changes that embrace expanded artistic offerings, flexibility and a diverse selection of experiences, featuring the ensemble in ways both familiar and new. In 2016/17, Steppenwolf will produce an expanded six-play Subscription Season, as opposed to the previous five-play season, in a new format that features four plays in the Downstairs Theatre with the opportunity for subscribers to choose between two productions in the Upstairs Theatre.

Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking play, the first on Broadway written by a Black woman, will visit the Belgrade Theatre from Tues 22 - Sat 26 March in a new production directed by Eclipse Theatre's Dawn Walton. This intense family drama, written on the cusp of the civil rights era, sees the Younger family await the arrival of a cheque for a life changing $10,000. Driven to conflict as they encounter issues of inequality, housing and lack of opportunity that continue to resonate today, the play acts as a stark warning to anyone who measures happiness and personal worth in capital gain.