Victory Gardens Announces 2011-12 Season, Includes Rulh, Rebeck

Artistic Director Dennis Zacek and Executive Director Jan Kallish announce the 2011-2012 Victory Gardens season. The season will include In the Next Room or the vibrator play by Sarah Ruhl; What We're Up Against by Teresa Rebeck; We Are Proud to Present ..., a play developed as part of IGNITION by Jackie Sibblies Drury; and Goodman Theatre's production of Red by Victory Gardens Ensemble Playwright John Logan. The final play of the season will be announced at a later date.

"These women-Ruhl, Rebeck and Sibblies Drury-who wrote three of our five plays next season are talking with humor and passion about sexuality, equality, science, race, and the workplace--both at this moment and through the lens of history and I am thrilled to put them center stage," says Associate Artistic Director Sandy Shinner. " I have the deepest respect for these master playwrights: Sarah Ruhl and Theresa Rebeck. To produce In the Next Room or the vibrator play here on Sarah's home turf is a special honor. The exciting vibe of What We're Up Against has generated a rolling world premiere at three National Theatres and Jackie Sibblies Drury, our 2010 Ignition standout, is following in their footsteps with her provocative premiere. Top that off with Victory Gardens Ensemble Playwright John Logan's Tony-Award winning Red with the Goodman, and the VG season is nothing short of electric."

The 2011-12 Victory Gardens Season includes:

In the Next Room or the vibrator play
by Sarah Ruhl
directed by Jessica Thebus
September 9 - October 10, 2011
Press Opening Monday, September 19, 2011

Sarah Ruhl brings her Tony-nominated Broadway hit home to Chicago.

In the twilight of the Victorian age, a buzzworthy new medical device is developed to calm women with "hysteria." In fact, it has quite a stimulating effect when used in the home offices of Dr. Givings, that most modern of men. As he pioneers an intimate new therapy, his young wife becomes determined to investigate the experiments that have patient after patient leaving the procedure room with the rosy glow of pleasure. Ruhl's stylish comedy pulses and hums along as it dispels old-fashioned notions of female sexuality, intimacy and marriage at the dawn of the age of electricity.

Goodman Theatre's production of Red
by John Logan
directed by Robert Falls
Performances at Goodman Theatre
September/October 2011

Full-blooded and visceral, the Tony Award-winning Red takes you into the mind of abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, for whom paintings are "pulsating" life forces and art is intended to stop the heart. Red chronicles the tormented painter's two-year struggle to complete a lucrative set of murals for Manhattan's exclusive Four Seasons restaurant, and his fraught relationship with a seemingly naïve young assistant, who must choose between appeasing his mentor-and changing the course of art history. Set amid the swiftly-changing cultural tide of the early 1960s, Red is a startling snapshot of a brilliant artist at the height of his fame, a play hailed as "intense and exciting" by the New York Times.

As part of their subscription to the 2011-12 Season, Victory Gardens subscribers will attend the international hit Red by Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble Member John Logan at Goodman Theatre in the Downtown Theatre District-satisfying the huge audience demand for this electrifying story. Victory Gardens subscribers will reserve their tickets during an exclusive pre-sale period before tickets go on sale to the general public-at an exclusive Victory Gardens subscriber-only discount. Patrons who have subscriptions to both Victory Gardens and The Goodman will be offered another show to attend. Details on ordering are forthcoming from Victory Gardens.

What We're Up Against
by Theresa Rebeck
directed by Associate Artistic Director Sandy Shinner
January 27 - February 26, 2012
Press Opening Monday, February 6, 2012

An explosive new work from the award-winning television/film writer and playwright Teresa Rebeck in a rolling world premiere as part of Victory Gardens' participation in the National New Play Network.

Deep within the offices of a highly competitive architectural firm, two men discuss a co-worker. Well-not so much discuss as unleash whisky-fueled rants about her. As the team's plans for a new mall stall out, old workplace hidden alliances and secret betrayals play out in entirely new and unexpected ways-fueling a complicated modern battle of the sexes that rages across Cubicle Land. Rebeck's bold, fascinating and very funny new work bulldozes through the crumbling artifices of contemporary American corporate culture.

We Are Proud to Present a Presentation
About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa,
From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915
by Jackie Sibblies Drury
Directed by Eric Ting
from Victory Gardens' 2010 IGNITION Festival
March 30 - April 29, 2012
Press Opening Monday, April 9, 2012

Direct from IGNITION, the festival that brought you Pulitzer finalist The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, comes this brave new work that sent chills and laughter through this summer's festival audiences.

When a group of actors gather together to give a presentation on a distant genocide, they realize that summaries based on history books aren't nearly enough to capture the complexity of human extermination-or human interaction. In an honest attempt to delve deeper, they crash into their own simmering fears and unconscious bigotry and come face to face with the potential for brutality in all of us.

IGNITION, Victory Gardens daring and hugely successful new play development initiative, was conceived to support the theater's mission of new play development and diversity. In the spring of 2010, 120 writers of color under 40 years of age from around the United States submitted new scripts for the first phase of IGNITION. The top six plays were then selected, workshopped and presented as staged readings in a weeklong festival later that same summer. From the top six, Jackie Sibblies Drury's We Are Proud to Present... was selected to be part of Victory Gardens mainstage season.

Final Selection for 2011-12 TBA
May 25 - June 6, 2012
Press Opening Monday, June 4, 2012

Subscriptions and Flex Passes for Victory Gardens 2011-2012 season, offering up to 35% savings on single tickets, will go on sale on Wednesday, March 9th on the company's website, www.victorygardens.org and by phone at the Victory Gardens Box Office at The Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773.871.3000 (TTY: 773.871.0682).

The Victory Gardens Biograph Theater is located at 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue, in the heart of Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood. Benefits of subscribing include convenient parking; easy access via CTA, ticket exchange privileges; invitations to special events, discounted series for educators, younger audiences and persons with disabilities; pre- and post-show deals at nearby restaurants and nightclubs; and a complimentary subscription to Victory Magazine.

About Victory Gardens Theater
Under the leadership of Artistic Director Dennis Za?ek and Executive Director Jan Kallish, Victory Gardens Theater is home to the bold voices of world premiere theater. The company features the work of its own 14-member Playwrights Ensemble, as well as that of exciting playwrights who are changing theater in the U.S. and abroad. Since its founding in 1974, the company has produced more world premieres than any other Chicago theater, a commitment recognized nationally when Victory Gardens received the 2001 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. The company's dedication to developing, supporting and producing new work makes Victory Gardens an American Center for New Plays.

In 2006, Victory Gardens successfully completed an $11.8 million renovation of Chicago's famed Biograph Theater, and moved two blocks north from its longtime venue at 2257 N. Lincoln Avenue, to its beautiful new home in one of Chicago's most celebrated historic landmarks. Renamed Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, the new venue is a state-of-the-art 299-seat mainstage which has greatly expanded the company's artistic flexibility, while enhancing Victory Gardens' ability to welcome patrons old and new.

Last summer, Victory Gardens completed the second phase of renovation at the Biograph, building an intimate, new, 109-seat studio theater on the second floor. On March 1, 2010, at a special launch event for Victory Gardens $1 million Campaign for Growth, the theater's new studio was officially named the Richard Christiansen Theater, in honor of the Chicago Tribune chief critic emeritus and longtime champion of Chicago's live theater scene. Visit www.victorygardens.org/campaignforgrowth for more details.

Victory Gardens Theater receives major funding from Allstate Insurance Company, Alphawood Foundation, Chicago Community Trust, John T. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Shubert Foundation, Wallace Foundation, Polk Bros. Foundation, Boeing Company, Motorola Foundation, Charles & M.R. Shapiro Foundation, Inc, Polk Bros. Foundation, REAM Foundation and Crown Family Philanthropies. Additional funding is provided by: National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council (IAC), a State Agency, CityArts Program 4 Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, Charles and M.R. Shapiro Foundation, and by 3Arts, Harry S. Black and Allon Fuller Fund, Charles H. and Bertha L. Boothroyd Foundation, Elizabeth Cheney Foundation, John R. Halligan Fund, Illinois Tool Works (ITW), James S. Kemper Foundation, Irving Harris Foundation and Wrightwood Neighbors Association.

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