Tonya Pinkins, F. Murray Abraham, John Doyle & More Will Head Off-Broadway for Classic Stage Company's 2015-16 Season

Classic Stage Company, under the leadership of Artistic Director Brian Kulick and Managing Director Jeff Griffin, today announced plans for its 2015/2016 Season.

The esteemed East Village company's 49th season will kick off in September with Greek Festival, celebrating classical Greek theater, as explored by some of the downtown theater scene's most exciting artists, including playwright Anne Washburn and director Rachel Chavkin. In December, Brian Kulick will direct Tony Award winner Tonya Pinkins in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, featuring original music by Tony Award winner Duncan Sheik. In March 2016, Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham returns to CSC starring in Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in a translation by John Christopher Jones. And the Mainstage season concludes in May 2016 with a new production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, directed by Tony Award winner and CSC Associate Director John Doyle, who directed the acclaimed productions of Passion and Allegro at CSC.

CLASSIC STAGE COMPANY'S 2015/16 SEASON

GREEK FESTIVAL
August/September 2015

CSC starts the season with a celebration of classical Greek theatre, gathering some of the best and brightest artists in the downtown theater scene to explore this rich and ever-fertile dramatic soil. Expect the unexpected in this month-long festival of productions, workshops, readings, seminars and Greek culture.

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS (Mainstage Production)
By EURIPIDES
Translated by ANNE WASHBURN
Directed by RACHEL CHAVKIN

Playwright Anne Washburn (Mr. Burns, a post-electric play) and director Rachel Chavkin (Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812) team up to re-imagine Euripides' last play. King Agamemnon and his thousand ships are stranded on the island of Aulis waiting for a wind to bring them to the shores of Troy. To gain that wind he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Witness his terrible choice in this remarkable and rarely-seen Greek tragedy.

THE FRAGMENTS (Staged Reading Series)
Distinguished playwrights Ellen McLaughlin, Charles L. Mee, and Mac Wellman each take a fragment from the lost corpus of classical Greek plays from Sophocles and Euripides and weave them into three full dramatic evenings.

SEMINARS
Classical Greek scholar Helene Foley, Professor of Classical Studies at Barnard College, curates a series of seminars devoted to each of these dramatic presentations.

ORESTEIA (Open Workshop)
Jump to the end of the Trojan War and King Agamemnon's tragic return home in this workshop production by director Jonathan Vandenberg: a bold experimental deconstruction of Aeschylus' ORESTEIA told through a stream of haunting, dream-like images that follow in the tradition of such ground-breaking artists as Robert Wilson and Romeo Castellucci.

MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN
By BERTOLT BRECHT
New Music by DUNCAN SHEIK
Directed by BRIAN KULICK
with TONYA PINKINS
December 2015

CSC continues its exploration of Bertolt Brecht with a look at his most famous play. The indomitable Mother Courage follows one luckless army after another across a war-torn world in her canteen wagon. She'll do anything to hold onto her money-making wagon, even if it means the loss of her children. Experience a timeless tale of war and big business updated to the modern-day conflagration in the Congo, starring Tony Award winner Tonya Pinkins with a new and vibrant score by Tony Award-winning composer Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening, American Psycho).

NATHAN THE WISE
By GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING
Translated by JOHN CHRISTOPHER JONES
Directed by BRIAN KULICK
with F. MURRAY ABRAHAM
March 2016

Jerusalem, 1192. Muslims, Christians and Jews live side by side thanks to a fragile truce that could collapse at any moment. As the tension mounts a question arises from the ruling Sultan: which religion is the one most beloved by God? Nathan, a pious Jewish merchant, is charged with answering this question to help secure the continued safety of his people. Next to Shylock, Nathan the Wise is perhaps the greatest Jewish character in all of Western dramatic literature. Academy Award-winning actor F. Murray Abraham returns to CSC after his critically-acclaimed portrayal of Galileo, adding Nathan to his illustrious gallery of revelatory portrayals.

PEER GYNT
By HENRIK IBSEN
Directed and Adapted by JOHN DOYLE
May 2016

Director John Doyle (Passion, Allegro) returns to CSC with his own rendering of Ibsen's tale of the misadventures of Peer Gynt. Follow young Peer from childhood renegade to outcast, adventurer, industrialist and provocateur as he searches for a life that will live up to his impossible and irrepressible expectations.

The 2015/2016 Season will also include the following Special Series:

MONDAY NIGHT UNCLE VANYA
January 2016

After a decade of exploring Shakespeare with CSC's popular Monday Night Open Rehearsal Series, we turn our attention to another of CSC's beloved authors: Anton Chekhov. Join us as we go behind the scenes to investigate one of Chekhov's most ferocious masterpieces: UNCLE VANYA. Each Monday night, audiences will share a different act of the play with a different company of actors and directors as they work their way through this extraordinary tragicomedy of a life not lived.

THE YOUNG COMPANY: OTHELLO
By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
March 2016

Our Young Company returns with a production of OTHELLO specially tailored for young audiences. Celebrating its 10th Anniversary, this unique collaboration with the Graduate Acting Program of Columbia University's School of the Arts has now grown to reach all five of New York's boroughs, introducing more than 20,000 young people to the power of live theatre over the past decade and becoming a multi-year recipient of the Shakespeare in American Communities grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

FIRST LOOK FESTIVAL: IBSEN
May 2016

In conjunction with our production of Henrik Ibsen's PEER GYNT, we turn over our popular reading series to this master of modern drama. Join us as we take a look at three of Ibsen's greatest plays: HEDDA GABLER, A DOLL'S HOUSE and the rarely-seen THE WILD DUCK. These works revolutionized the theatre, introducing a new mode of dramatic expression that we now call realism. Witness the birth of this movement in these landmark plays.

Subscriptions for the 2015/2016 Season will go on sale to the general public at 12pm on Monday, May 4. Visit classicstage.org for details.