TheaterWorks Hartford Shares 2022-2023 Season Lineup

TheaterWorks Hartford, under the leadership of Producing Artistic Director Rob Ruggiero, is excited to announce its upcoming 2022-2023 season.

Rob said "This season, we're focusing on plays that we hope inspire our audiences to come see LIVE theater. Great music, captivating stories, and world-class writing - these stories are uplifting, powerful ... and will engage us all in important conversations. We're particularly excited that they are written by four female playwrights representing the best and most important voices in American theater. These plays tell our stories."

The 2022-2023 season will open with FUN HOME music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel running October 8 through October 30, 2022. Rob said "We've been waiting to produce this musical since before the pandemic. It's extraordinary - a singularly powerful piece of theater."

QUEEN OF BASEL, a "provocative exploration of race, class, gender, and Latinx identity" (DCist) by Hilary Bettis will run February 4 through March 5. Rob said, "I read this play when it first appeared and immediately responded to it's passion and unique articulation of Julie and John's fiery relationship. A 'contemporary retelling' of a classic, I have no doubt, audiences will be rewarded with a powerful evening of theater."

THE REMBRANDT by Jessica Dickey will directed by Tracy Brigden and runs April 29 through May 28, 2023. Tracy said "Jessica delves into the human condition with so much depth and honesty that no matter the topic, she finds an abundance of humanity, forgiveness, love and humor in her subjects. THE REMBRANDT moves through time boldly exploring the boundaries of love and relationship. It also presents a really exciting opportunity to partner with our friends at the Wadsworth."

Straight from New York, CLYDE'S by Pulitzer prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage closes our season. An allegory that asks big questions about how we live meaningful lives and what it means to move forward from a difficult past, this magically joyous new play by one of America's most celebrated female playwrights runs July 8 through Aug 6, 2023.

Additionally, TheaterWorks Hartford's twisted holiday tradition, Christmas On The Rocks, returns November 30 -23 for its 10th annual production. This "shiny, new and dangerously irreverent holiday production" (New York Times) features your favorite kids from Christmas stories-all grown up, shaken, stirred, and served with a twist (not a part of the subscription season).

Season subscriptions start at $190. Performances take place at TheaterWorks Hartford's historic home located downtown at 233 Pearl Street. Subscriptions can be purchased online at twhartford.org or by calling 860.527.7838.

Please visit twhartford.org for more information.

About TheaterWorks Hartford's 2022 - 2023 Season

FUN HOME
music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron
based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel
directed by Rob Ruggiero
October 8 through October 30, 2022

One of the most groundbreaking musicals to hit Broadway and the winner of 5 Tony Awards including Best Musical. FUN HOME introduces us to Alison at three different ages, revealing memories of her uniquely dysfunctional family. Moving through past and present, Alison relives her childhood and her growing understanding of her sexuality, while she reconciles her relationship to her volatile, brilliant, enigmatic father

CHRISTMAS ON THE ROCKS - 10th Anniversary Production!
(not a part of the subscription season)

QUEEN OF BASEL
by Hilary Bettis
February 4 through March 5, 2023
It's Miami's Art Basel, where real estate heiress Julie reigns over the blowout her mogul father is throwing at his South Beach hotel. But after tangling with him and a tray of drinks, Julie plots her next move in the hotel's storage kitchen with Christine, a cocktail waitress who recently fled violence in Venezuela, and Christine's fiancé John, an Uber driver with ambitions. This explosive elixir of power, class, and race within the Latinx community is a bold and contemporary take on Strindberg's Miss Julie.

THE REMBRANDT
by Jessica Dickey
directed by Tracy Brigden
April 29 through May 28, 2023
When a museum guard decides to touch a famous Rembrandt painting, a remarkable journey across the ages ensues. Spanning centuries of human experience, The Rembrandt is a visually stunning, theatrical tour-de-force that movingly explores the power of creative expression and the sacrifices we make in the pursuit of love and beauty.

CLYDE'S
by Lynn Nottage
Directed by TBD
July 8 through Aug 6, 2023
A truck stop sandwich shop offers its formerly incarcerated kitchen staff a shot at reclaiming their lives. Even as the shop's callous owner tries to keep them under her thumb, the staff members are given purpose and permission to dream by their shared quest to create the perfect sandwich. A new comedy by the 2 TIME Pulitzer Prize winning author of SWEAT and RUINED.

About the Artists

Jeanine Tesori (FUN HOME music) has written a diverse catalog for Broadway, opera, film and television. Her Broadway musicals include: Fun Home (2015 Tony Award Winner, Pulitzer finalist); Violet; Caroline, or Change; Shrek the Musical; Thoroughly Modern Millie; Twelfth Night (LCT); John Guare's A Free Man of Color. Delacorte: Mother Courage (starring Meryl Streep). She has received five Tony nominations, three Obie Awards and three Drama Desk Awards. The hallmarks of her work have been described as "close-to-the-surface emotion, structural rigor and rhythmic drive." Her operas include: The Lion, the Unicorn and Me and Blizzard on Marblehead Neck (MET/LCT Opera/Theater and Glimmerglass Opera commission); her collaboration with Tazewell Thompson, Blue. She wrote the musical featured in the 2016 revival of Gilmore Girls and has also written special material for artists such as The Girl in 14G for Kristin Chenoweth and has been featured in the documentaries Show Business and Theater of War. Jeanine Tesori became the founding Artistic Director of a new concert series at New York City Center called Encores! Off-Center, for which she has helmed seasons joined by artists such as Stephen Sondheim, Lin Manuel-Miranda, Randy Newman, William Finn, Alan Menken, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Sutton Foster and Jonathan Groff. After producing four seasons of Off-Center concerts, she took one of those concerts, Sunday in the Park with George (starring Jake Gyllenhaal) to Broadway where she produced the 2017 revival, with ATG and Riva Marker. She was the recording producer for Sunday as well as the Original Cast Recordings of Violet; Caroline, or Change; Shrek; and Twelfth Nigh

Lisa Kron (FUN HOME book and lyrics) is a writer and performer whose work has been widely produced in New York, regionally, and internationally. Her plays include Well, 2.5 Minute Ride and The Ver**zon Play. She wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Fun Home (with music by composer Jeanine Tesori), winner of five 2015 Tony Awards including Best Musical. Lisa and Jeanine were the first all-woman team to ever receive a Tony for best score. As an actor Lisa was most recently seen as Mrs. Mi-Tzu and Mrs. Yang in the Foundry Theater's acclaimed production of Good Person of Szechuan (Lortel Award, Outstanding Featured Actress). Honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artists Award, and the Cal Arts/Alpert Award. She is a proud founding member of the OBIE- and Bessie-Award-winning collaborative theater company The Five Lesbian Brothers. Lisa currently serves as Secretary of the Dramatists Guild Council and on the boards of the McDowell Colony and the Lilly Awards.

Alison Bechdel (FUN HOME Graphic Novelist) is a cartoonist and graphic memoirist exploring the complexities of familial relationships in multilayered works that use the interplay of word and image to weave sophisticated narratives. Bechdel's command of sequential narrative and her aesthetic as a visual artist was established in her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008), which realistically captured the lives of women in the lesbian community as they influenced and were influenced by the important cultural and political events of the day. Garnering a devoted and diverse following, this pioneering work was a precursor to her book-length graphic memoirs. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) is a nuanced depiction of a childhood spent in an artistic family in a small Pennsylvania town and of her relationship with her father, a high school English teacher and funeral home director. An impeccable observer and record keeper, Bechdel incorporates drawings of archival materials, such as diaries, letters, photographs, and news clippings, as well as a variety of literary references in deep reflections into her own past. With storytelling that is striking for its conceptual depth and complexity in structure as well as for the deft use of allusion and reference, Bechdel is changing our notions of the contemporary memoir and expanding the expressive potential of the graphic form.

Hilary Bettis (Playwright) is a critically-acclaimed playwright whose work has been developed and produced all over the country including, Roundabout Theatre, New Georges, The Sol Project, Miami New Drama, Studio Theatre, Alley Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, La Jolla Playhouse, amongst others. Accolades include, Egerton Foundation New Play Awards, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a finalist for the Blackburn Prize, Kendeda Award, Nuestras Voces National Playwriting Competition, American Blues Theater's Blue Ink Award, amongst others. In television Bettis won the 2019 Writer's Guild of America Award for her work on the critically acclaimed, Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning FX series The Americans. She wrote for the Hulu miniseries The Dropout, starring Kate McKinnon, and Amazon's Rodeo Queens starring Dakota Johnson and Fred Armisen. She's an alumni of The Sundance Institute Episodic TV Lab, and is developing projects for AMC, Hulu, and PatMa. She's a graduate of The Juilliard School. Proud member of The Kilroys and WGAEast. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, two cats, and a tiny tiny human that cries a lot. She is represented by CAA and Grandview. www.HilaryBettisWriter.com

Jessica Dickey (Playwright) is an award-winning playwright whose writing was hailed by New York Times as having "freshness, economy, cheeky vulgarity, with a fine measure of poetic insight", and the New Yorker magazine as "funny, smart, deep and sad". She recently signed a development deal with ABC and Touchstone (Fox21). Jessie's most recent play, The Convent, a dark comedy about a group of women who try to live like nuns in the middle ages, premiered Off-Broadway this year in a sold-out co-production with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Rising Phoenix and WeatherVane, and is now being developed into a series for Sarah Jessica Parker's company Pretty Matches. Jessie's play The Rembrandt (about a museum guard who decides to deliberately touch a Rembrandt painting) had a sold out run at Steppenwolf starring John Mahoney. Other plays have been premiered Off-Broadway in New York and produced around the country -- The Amish Project, about the 2006 Nickel Mines school shooting in an Amish community; then Charles Ives Take Me Home, about a violinist father and his basketball star daughter; and Row After Row, a dark comedy about Civil War re-enactors. In television, Jessie recently joined the writers room for Apple TV's comedy "Physical", starring Rose Byrne. Jessie is a member of the exclusive New Dramatists and a recipient of the prestigious Stavis Award.

Lynn Nottage (Playwright) is a playwright and a screenwriter. She is the first, and remains the only, woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice. Her plays have been produced widely in the United States and throughout the world. Most recently, Nottage premiered MJ the Musical, directed by Christopher Wheeldon and featuring the music of Michael Jackson, at the Neil Simon Theater on Broadway, Clyde's directed by Kate Whoriskey at Second Stage Theater on Broadway and an opera adaptation of her play Intimate Apparel composed by Ricky Ian Gordon and directed by Bart Sher, commissioned by The Met/Lincoln Center Theater. Her other work includes, Floyd's (retitled- Clyde's) (Guthrie Theater), the musical adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Secret Life of Bees, with music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead (The Atlantic Theater), Mlima's Tale (Public Theater), By The Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lilly Award, Drama Desk Nomination- Second Stage/Signature Theater), Ruined (Pulitzer Prize, OBIE, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics' Circle, Audelco, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award- MTC/Goodman Theater); Intimate Apparel (American Theatre Critics and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play Center Stage/SCR/ Roundabout Theater); Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (OBIE Award - Playwrights Horizons/Signature Theater); Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por'knockers; and POOF! Her play Sweat (Pulitzer Prize, Evening Standard Award, Obie Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Tony Nomination, Drama Desk Nomination) moved to Broadway after a sold-out run at The Public Theater. It premiered and was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival American Revolutions History Cycle/Arena Stage. Inspired by her research on Sweat, Nottage developed This is Reading, a performance installation based on two years of interviews, at the Franklin Street, Reading Railroad Station in Reading, PA in July 2017.

About TheaterWorks Hartford
Celebrating its 37th season, TheaterWorks Hartford (TWH) produces high quality, contemporary theater that is relevant to our audiences, engages a diverse community, and provides insight into the human experience. TWH is committed to the power of storytelling in creating community. Founded in 1985, TWH has produced over 170 plays and presents approximately 225 performances per season. TWH also owns and manages the historic property at 233 Pearl Street, known as City Arts on Pearl. City Arts provides an affordable home and services to a diverse family of non-profit arts organizations.

Support:
TheaterWorks Hartford is supported by Hartford Foundation For Public Giving, Greater Hartford Arts Council, Travelers, Bank of America, , CT Office Of The Arts, CT Humanities, Lincoln Financial Foundation, Maximilian E. & Marion O. Hoffman Foundation, Richard P. Garmany Fund, Raytheon Technologies, J. Walton Bissell Foundation, Burry Fredrik Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, Ensworth Charitable Foundation, George A. and Grace L. Long Foundation,TD Bank, Liberty Bank, William And Alice Mortensen Foundation,The Saunders Foundation, The Elizabeth M. Landon and Harriette M. Landon Charitable Trust, Prudential Retirement, The Katherine K. McLane and Henry R. McLane Charitable Trust, Cheryl Chase and Stuart Bear Family Foundation, John and Kelly Hartman Foundation