OTHER DESERT CITIES, FREUD'S LAST SESSION and More Set for FUSION Theatre's 2012-13 Season

FUSION, New Mexico's professional theatre company, travels new roads and takes bold steps with an outstanding line-up of main stage offerings for the 2012-2013 season. Featuring award-winning new plays, FUSION continues its tradition of bringing audiences the brightest stars in contemporary playwriting matched with the excellence of our professional Acting Company, directors, and design team.

FUSION opens its season with John Robin Baitz' Other Desert Cities. Straight from its highly successful run at Lincoln Center, this new contemporary play won the Drama League Award for Distinguished Play, was named Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play by the Outer Critics Circle, and was a 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Baitz presents a finely crafted drama focusing on a young novelist returning to her Palm Springs family home as she announces a completed memoir and her desire to unlock the lives they once had. As in all desert lands, mirage can transfix and trick the inhabitants and as the heat gives way, reality comes into sharp and unrelenting focus as it does in the artful playing of Other Desert Cities. FUSION's production travels to The Lensic in Santa Fe, for the final weekend of performance.

In November, Freud's Last Session by Mark St. Germain graces the stages of The Cell, the South Broadway Cultural Center, and The Lensic! Still playing in open runs in New York and Chicago, Freud's Last Session won the Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play of 2012. Two great minds, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, collide on the eve of WWII. Both in the game of searching, they take on faith, love, sex, and the meaning of life. St. Germain's play manages to capture the hearts and souls of these men with their wit, weaknesses, strengths and all that makes up the human experience.

As spring dawns, FUSION brings Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park, the 2012 Tony Award Winner for Best Play to Albuquerque and Santa FE. Norris' masterpiece is a wickedly funny and fiercely provocative play about race, real estate, and the volatile values of each. This production will be mounted at The Cell, The Historic KiMo Theater, and The Lensic. In addition to the Tony, Clybourne Park received the Olivier Award, Evening Standard Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Inspired by A Raisin in The Sun, Clybourne Park explodes in two outrageous acts set 50 years apart. Act One takes place in 1959, as nervous community leaders anxiously try to stop the sale of a home to a black family. Act Two is set in the same house in the present day, as the now predominantly African-American neighborhood battles to hold its ground in the face of gentrification.

April is the month of Humble Boy, Charlotte Jones' stunningly beautiful, funny, and poignant contemporary retelling of the Hamlet story. All is not well in the Humble family hive. Thirty five year old Felix Humble is a Cambridge astrophysicist in search of a unified field theory. Following the sudden death of his father, he returns to his middle England home and his difficult and demanding mother, where he soon realizes that his search for unity must include his own chaos theory both past and present. Humble Boy will play at The Cell, The Lensic and The KiMo. Humble Boy is a winner of the Critics Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play.

FUSION's season culminates with its eighth annual short play festival The Seven. The festival theme will be nominated and selected by audience patrons this fall and will spark the imaginations and skill of playwrights both nationally and internationally. Receiving over 700 script submissions last season, we expect our valued festival will bring the best and brightest to The Cell stage. FUSION's festival will partner with the Savor Albuquerque Festival in June along with the Samuel French OOB Festival based in the Big Apple.

Production dates, venues, and season subscriptions are available at FUSIONnm.org or by calling FUSION at 505-766-9412.