Second Stage Announces Upcoming Season

Following a critically acclaimed season which included the New York Premiere of Edward Albee's Peter and Jerry and the musical Next to Normal starring Alice Ripley and Brian d'Arcy James, Second Stage Theatre (Carole Rothman, Artistic Director; Ellen Richard, Executive Director) has announced three of the four plays scheduled for its upcoming 30th Anniversary Season.  For subscription or ticket information, please call the Second Stage Box Office at 212-246-4422 or visit the company's website, www.2ST.com.  All productions are staged at Second Stage Theatre, 307 West 43rd Street (just west of Eighth Avenue).

Second Stage Theatre's upcoming 30th Anniversary Season will continue the company's mission of producing bold new plays and musicals by American playwrights as well as second stagings of the best of contemporary theatre. The season will kick off in the fall with a 20th Anniversary staging of Howard Korder's 1988 breakthrough play BOYS' LIFE, followed by Gina Gionfriddo's BECKY SHAW, directed by Peter Dubois, which recently received a critically acclaimed world premiere staging at the Humana Festival.  The 30th Anniversary season will also include the world premiere of MR. & MRS. FITCH, by Douglas Carter Beane, whose Tony-nominated hit The Little Dog Laughed had its world premiere at Second Stage Theatre in 2005.  A fourth production remains to be announced.

More detailed information on Second Stage Theatre's upcoming season follows:

BOYS' LIFE
20th Anniversary production
Written by Howard Korder
Director TBA
Previews begin mid-September; opening in mid-October

Twenty years after its acclaimed world premiere, Howard Korder's BOYS' LIFE will receive its first major New York remounting.  Originally produced in 1988, Boys' Life is a stinging and candid look at three college buddies making their way in the big city.  As they maneuver between life and sex in New York, Korder lacerates the prolonged adolescence that often takes the place of modern manhood.

Playwright HOWARD KORDER's other plays include Search and Destroy (Broadway, South Coast Rep, Yale Rep, and London's Royal Court), Sea of Tranquility (Atlantic Theater Company), The Hollow Lands (South Coast Rep), The Lights (Obie Award), Fun (Humana Festival), and Nobody (O'Neill Playwrights Conference), among others.  He also wrote The Passion of Ayn Rand for Showtime, starring Helen Mirren and Peter Fonda, and co-wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film Lakeview Terrace starring Samuel L. Jackson and Patrick Wilson.

BECKY SHAW
New York Premiere
Written by Gina Gionfriddo
Directed by Peter Dubois
Previews begin January 2009; opening in mid-February

The recent runaway hit of the Humana Festival will have its New York premiere at Second Stage Theatre in early 2009.  In BECKY SHAW, a newlywed couple fixes up two romantically challenged friends: wife's best friend, meet husband's sexy and strange new co-worker. When an evening calculated to bring happiness takes a dark turn, crisis and comedy ensue in this wickedly funny new play that asks what we owe the people we love and the strangers who land on our doorstep.

In his review of the Humana Festival production of BECKY SHAW, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called the comedy "a thoroughly enjoyable play, suspenseful, witty and infused with an unsettling sense of the potential for psychic disaster inherent in almost any close relationship."

GINA GIONFRIDDO is the author of After Ashley (Vineyard Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville), U.S. Drag (Clubbed Thumb, Connecticut Rep; published by Smith & Kraus in Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2002), Guinevere (Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference), Safe, and Trepidation Nation (both at Actors Theatre of Louisville), among other plays.  She has received an Obie Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, a Lucille Lortel Fellowship, and a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship.

Director Peter Dubois is the newly appointed Artistic Director of Boston's Huntington Theatre Company.  Also a former Artistic Director of Alaska's innovative Perseverance Theatre Company, DuBois' recent work includes the Obie Award-winning production of David Grimm's Measure for Pleasure, as well as Richard III starring Peter Dinklage (both at the Public Theatre) and the LAByrinth Theatre Company's co-production of Bob Glaudini's Jack Goes Boating starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Ortiz, Beth Cole and Daphne Rubin-Vega.  He is staging a new adaptation of Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class this spring at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre.

MR. & MRS. FITCH
World Premiere comedy
Written by Douglas Carter Beane
Director TBA
Previews begin mid March 2009; opening early April

Meet gossip columnists MR. & MRS. FITCH.  When the social circuit no longer provides any scandalous news, they find that great celebrity can appear out of thin air. Tony Award nominee Douglas Carter Beane's (The Little Dog Laughed, Xanadu) wicked new comedy is a scathing look at who is in, who is out and who may not even exist at all.

Douglas Carter Beane returns to Second Stage Theatre, which produced the world premiere of his Tony-nominated Best Play The Little Dog Laughed.  His other works include the book for the musical Xanadu, As Bees in Honey Drown (Outer Critics Circle, Gassner Award), Music From a Sparkling Planet, The Country Club, Advice From a Caterpillar, The Cartells.  Musicals: The Big Time and the upcoming Lysistrata Jones and The Bandwagon.  Revues: Mondo Drama and White Lies. Screenplays: Advice From a Caterpillar (Aspen Comedy Festival Best Feature); To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. As Artistic Director of the Drama Dept., he produced more than 40 productions including revivals of As Thousands Cheer, June Moon and The Torchbearers and world premieres by Paul Rudnick, David Sedaris and Wendy Wasserstein.

For more information, please visit www.2ST.com.