Undermain Theatre Announces Its 40th Season
Undermain will present the oldest known, extant, complete drama, The Persians by Aeschylus in a vivid and searing adaptation by playwright and actress Ellen McLaughlin.
By: A.A. Cristi Apr. 06, 2023
Celebrating 40 years of light underground with a landmark anniversary season, Undermain Theatre will present its 40th season of cutting edge performance in September. Our season, from the fall of 2023 to the summer of 2024, will be a season of unlimited boundaries and will find us working both with long time collaborators as well as artists and voices new to the Undermain.
The season will open with a bold new southern gothic drama by Star Finch, Bondage, which takes place on a small southern island during pre-emancipation times. The season continues into fall with a modern classic, No Man's Land by Harold Pinter where two aging men stake out the emotional territory of memory.
The winter of 2024 will bring the workshop series and a new play by the 2022 recipient of our Katherine Owens/Undermain Fund for New Work, Brian Dang and their poetic yet deadly love triangle, This time. In commemoration of the milestone of closing out the fourth decade of performance, Undermain will present the oldest known, extant, complete drama, The Persians by Aeschylus in a vivid and searing adaptation by playwright and actress Ellen McLaughlin.
"The spring of 2024 will also bring an opportunity to invite Dallas audiences and artists alike to honor Undermain's 40th anniversary with an event that will celebrate our 40 years of light underground. Thank you for helping us make it all happen!" says Bruce DuBose, Producing Artistic Director.
Bondage
By Star Finch
Directed by Jiles King
With Rhonda Boutté
A Regional Premiere
Preview Performances September 28 - 29, 2023
Opening Night Saturday, September 30, 2023
In Performance September 28 - October 15, 2023
Bondage takes place pre-Emancipation on a small island in the South. With the onset of puberty, Zuri must use her wits to outsmart the twisted desires of a drunken master and a sadistic mistress on a haunted plantation. Hierarchies of race and gender collide in this AfroSurreal tale of an enslaved girl who dares to follow her own instincts toward liberation by any means.
Star Finch is a native San Franciscan trying her best to hold ground amidst the Black-erasure of gentrification. She is currently the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Campo Santo and Crowded Fire Theater. She's also a resident playwright at Playwrights Foundation.
Finch's plays include H.O.M.E. [Hookers on Mars Eventually] and BONDAGE (Relentless Award honorable mention). Her multidisciplinary collaborations include Campo Santo's ETHOS DE MASQUERADE (with Global Street Dance Masquerade) and Crowded Fire's DEATH BECOME LIFE (with Ensemble Mik Nawooj and AXIS Dance Company).
Star Finch is interested in exploring the normalcy and constancy of menace as they pertain to the feminine. To that end, her plays are layered collages of the surreal and sacred nature of humanity. Finch seeks to split open seams of expectation to offer a peek into the abyss of horror and wonder veiled by the status quo.
No Man's Land
With Tyrees Allen and Bruce DuBose
A regional premiere
Preview Performances November 9 - 10, 2023
Opening Night Saturday, November 11, 2023
In Performance November 9 - December 3, 2023
*There will be no performance on Thursday, November 23 (Thanksgiving)
Set against the decayed elegance of a house in London's Hampstead Heath, in No Man's Land two men face each other over a drink. Do they know each other, or is each performing an elaborate character of recognition? Their ambiguity-and the comedy-intensify with the arrival of two younger men, the one ostensibly a manservant, the other a male secretary. All four inhabit a no man's land between time present and time remembered, between reality and imagination-a territory which Pinter explores with his characteristic mixture of biting wit, aggression, and anarchic sexuality.
.Harold Pinter was one of the most influential playwrights of the past 50 years. His landmark works for the theater include The Room, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, The Hothouse, The Caretaker (Tony nominee for Best Play), The Lover, The Homecoming (Tony Award for Best Play), Old Times (Tony nominee for Best Play), No Man's Land, Betrayal, Moonlight and Ashes To Ashes. In addition to plays, Pinter was also renowned for his screenplays, poetry and essays. He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature-only the fourth English language dramatist to win the award-in addition to being named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1966, a Companion of Honour in 2002, and receiving France's highest civil honour, the Légion d'honneur, in 2007. West End and Broadway marquees dimmed in Pinter's honor when he passed away in 2008 at the age of 78.
This time
By Brian Dang
Directed by Gabrielle Kurlander
A workshop production
Preview Performances February 29 and March 1, 2024
Opening Night Saturday, March 2, 2024
In Performance February 29 - March 17, 2024
Brian Dang was the 2022 recipient of the Katherine Owens/Undermain Fund for New Work for This time.
Jane holds a knife. It's bloody. Hester lies on a table. She's bloodied. Peregrine blows out a candle. Go back in time. Jane, Hester, and Peregrine work as maids in a 1900s manor, unable to say what they want to say, stealing moments away from work to hold time with each other. Their love bubbles under their words. We hear their thoughts they aren't yet brave enough to tell each other. They can't stop thinking of death. We hurtle towards it.
.
Brian Dang (they/them) is a Vietnamese/Chinese playwright, poet, and teaching artist based in Seattle. They are a proud resident playwright at Parley. For Brian, writing is an act of envisioning an eventual communing, an opportunity to freeze time as we know it, and a reaching for joy.
Their plays include This time (NPC Finalist 2022, Many Voices Fellowship Semi-Finalist 2022) and a white haunting (MAP Theatre, Princess Grace Fellowship Final Round). Their writing has been supported by 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and workshopped with Seattle Opera, Pork Filled Productions, Mirror Stage, Sound Theatre, and Theatre Battery. They teach poetry/theater with Writers in the Schools, Arts Corps, and more.
The Persians
By Aeschylus, adapted by Ellen McLaughlin
A regional premiere
Preview Performances: May 2-3, 2024
Opening Night: Saturday, May 4, 2024
In Performance: May 2 - 26, 2024
Considered the oldest surviving play in theater history, The Persians is unique among extant ancient Greek tragedies in that it dramatizes recent history rather than events from the distant age of mythical heroes. Its focus is the Battle of Salamis, won by the Greeks against an overwhelming Persian force in 480 B.C., eight years before the plays premiere in 472 B.C. and also a battle in which Aeschylus himself fought. The Persians concentrates on the demise of the Persian Empire, lamented by the Persian queen Atossa, by the folly of her son Xerxes, which caused the empire's downfall. The play also includes the appearance of the ghost of Xerxes' father, Darius, who declaims the ruin of his once-great empire. The Persians is the only surviving play in a trilogy that would otherwise be entirely lost. The trilogy won the first prize in the City Dionysia of Athens in 472 BCE and the resonance of the play for audiences from ancient times to the present remained, and remains strong in Ellen McLaughlin's riveting adaptation.
Aeschylus
Aeschylus is often recognized as the father of tragedy, and is the first of the three early Greek tragedians whose plays survive extant (the other two being Sophocles and Euripides). In fact, by expanding the number of characters in plays to allow for conflict among them (previously, only a single character interacted with the Chorus) he was arguably the founder of all serious Greek drama (although some credit that honor to Phrynichus or the even earlier Thespis). Only seven of over seventy plays written by Aeschylus have survived into modern times, the best known being The Oresteia trilogy.
Ellen McLaughlin's plays have received numerous national and international productions. They include Days and Nights Within, A Narrow Bed, Infinity's House, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Tongue of a Bird, The Trojan Women, Helen, The Persians, Oedipus, Ajax in Iraq, Kissing the Floor, Septimus and Clarissa, and Penelope. Producers include: The Public Theater, The National Actors' Theater and New York Theater Workshop in NYC, Actors' Theater of Louisville, The Actors' Gang L.A., Classic Stage Co., N.Y., The Intiman Theater, Seattle, Almeida Theater, London, The Mark Taper Forum, L.A., The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Getty Villa, California, and The Guthrie Theater, Minnesota, among other venues.
Grants and awards include: Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, Great American Play Contest, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the NEA, the Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, the Berilla Kerr Award for playwrighting. T.C.G./Fox Residency Grant -- for Ajax in Iraq, written for the A.R.T. Institute.
She has taught playwriting at Barnard College since 1995. Other teaching posts include Breadloaf School of English, Yale Drama School and Princeton University, among others.
Ms. McLaughlin is also an actor. She is most well known for having originated the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, appearing in every U.S. production from its earliest workshops through its Broadway run.
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