Classic Stage Company's 2013-14 Season to Include Patinkin's LAST TWO PEOPLE ON EARTH, Sheik's A MAN'S A MAN & More!

Classic Stage Company, under the leadership of Artistic Director Brian Kulick and Executive Director Greg Reiner, today announced plans for its upcoming season. The esteemed off-Broadway company, which is wrapping up one of its most successful seasons ever, will kick off its 2013/2014 Season in September with the previously announced new production ofShakespeare's ROMEO & JULIET, featuring acclaimed rising film actress Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene) and Finn Wittrock, who won raves last season on Broadway in Death of a Salesman. ROMEO & JULIET will be directed by Tea Alagi? (Jackie).

Following ROMEO AND JULIET, CSC's season continues in December with Tony Award winner Mandy Patinkin and acclaimed actor/performance artist Taylor Mac in THE LAST TWO PEOPLE ON EARTH: AN APOCALYPTIC VAUDEVILLE, directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner Susan Stroman, with music direction by Paul Ford. Following a flood of biblical proportions, the last two people on the planet discover their common language is song and dance. Together they chronicle the rise and fall and hopeful rise again of humankind through music that runs the gamut from Rodgers and Hammerstein, to Sondheim to Queen and R.E.M. Presented in association with Except For This LLC, this fully-staged workshop production will be performed at the Abrons Arts Center at the Henry Street Settlement.

In January, CSC will once again team up director Brian Kulick and composer Duncan Sheik (who collaborated on the theatre's current production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle), with a new production of Brecht's A MAN'S A MAN. This production continues CSC's popular exploration of Brecht, which began in 2012 with Galileo. In this early knock-about, anti-just-about-everything farce by Brecht, an innocent dockworker in British Colonial India is rather unorthodoxly enlisted into Her Majesty's Armed Forces, where he is "dismantled like a car" and then reassembled into the ultimate fighting machine.

CSC concludes its season in March with THE HEIR APPARENT, the latest comic romp from acclaimed playwright David Ives, based on the play by Jean-François Regnard and directed by John Rando. Ives' previous work for CSC includes The School for Lies, Venus in Fur and New Jerusalem. In this hilarious farce, Eraste has it all: good looks, a beautiful fiancée and a huge inheritance from an ancient uncle. There's just one little problem: the uncle won't die and he's bequeathed his entire fortune to a distant relative. What's a fine 18thcentury fellow to do? What else but enlist the aid of his resourceful servant, Crispin, who could "out-Figaro" Figaro.

The 2013/2014 Season will also reunite CSC with the Graduate Acting Program of the Columbia University School of the Arts for The Young Company, CSC'S unique Education and Outreach initiative that has greatly impacted the lives of thousands of New York City public schoolchildren throughout the five boroughs. This season The Young Company will feature Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST in March.

Additionally, CSC will bring back its popular Open Rehearsal Series, featuring a company of seasoned actors and directors exploring a classic text over the course of three Mondayevenings. This coming season will focus on Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR in October and in January, Brecht Fest will feature evenings dedicated to the poetry, songs, and short stories of Bertolt Brecht.

And finally, in April, CSC will present First Look Festival: Caryl Churchill, a one-night staged reading series exploring the visionary playwright's Cloud Nine, Fen and Mad Forest.

Subscriptions for the 2013/2014 Season will go on sale to the general public at 12pm on June 24. Starting today, June 17, patrons who join the Friends of CSC donors circle with a minimum tax-deductible donation of $150 to support the 2013/2014 Season will receive early access to subscriptions. Visit classicstage.org for details.

CSC is the award-winning Off-Broadway theatre committed to re-imaging the classical repertory for a contemporary American audience. Founded in 1967, CSC uses works of the past as a way to engage in the issues of today. Highly respected and widely regarded as a major force in American theatre, it has become the home to New York's finest established and emerging artists, the place where they gather to grapple with the great works of the world's repertory from Sophocles to Sondheim. CSC has been cited repeatedly by all the major Off-Broadway theater awards: Obies, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Body of Work.

CSC's 45th Anniversary season featured Anton Chekhov's Ivanov, starring Ethan Hawke, Joely Richardson and Juliet Rylance, directed by Austin Pendleton; followed by the highly-acclaimed, sold-out production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Passion, directed by John Doyle, and starring Melissa Errico, Judy Kuhn and Ryan Silverman; and concluding with Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, starring Christopher Lloyd, with music by Duncan Sheik, directed by Brian Kulick. Past productions include: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Bebe Neuwirth; Brecht's Galileo with F. Murray Abraham; Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard with Dianne Wiest and John Turturro; Chekhov's Three Sisters with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jessica Hecht, Juliet Rylance and Peter Sarsgaard; David Ives' The School for Lies with Hamish Linklater; Unnatural Acts conceived by Tony Speciale; Ostrovsky's The Forest with Dianne Wiest and John Douglas Thompson; David Ives' Venus in Fur with Nina Arianda (Broadway transfer 2011/2012, Tony Award nom. Best Play); Shakespeare's The Tempest with Mandy Patinkin; Chekhov's Uncle Vanya with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Denis O'Hare and Peter Sarsgaard; Anne Carson's An Oresteia; Chekhov's The Seagull with Dianne Wiest and Alan Cumming; David Ives' New Jerusalem with Richard Easton; Richard III, Richard II and Hamlet with Michael Cumpsty; Yasmina Reza's A Spanish Play with Zoe Caldwell; Steve Martin's adaptation of The Underpants; Philip Glass's In the Penal Colony; Bill Irwin's adaptation of Texts for Nothing; Waiting for Godot with John Turturro, Tony Shalhoub and Christopher Lloyd; Entertaining Mr. Sloane with Brian Murray; Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party with David Strathairn and Faust Parts I and II, directed by CSC founding Artistic Director Christopher Martin.