NOVEMBER, DEATH OF A SALESMAN, CLYBOURNE PARK and More Highlight Alley Theatre's 2012-13 Season

Gregory Boyd, Artistic Director of the Tony Award-winning Alley Theatre, announces its new season of exciting plays created by a diverse group of playwrights who have collectively earned three Pulitzer Prizes, multiple Tony and Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award.

The Alley Theatre is one of the few professional theatre Companies committed to the ideal of the resident company of artists, and they are featured in powerful roles in the upcoming season.

Company Artist James Black takes on the challenge of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, adding Willy Loman, the doomed title figure, to his list of Miller heroes. Previously at the Alley, Mr. Black has played Quentin in Miller’s searing examination of his haunted past and his tumultuous relationship with Marilyn Monroe in After the Fall(2005),as well as the flawed hero John Proctor of The Crucible (2005),and the troubled longshoreman Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge(1989).With Willy Loman, this consummate actor portrays one of the iconic roles in the American theatre in a performance not to be missed.

Company Artist John Tyson (currently surpassingly effective in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, now onstage at the Alley), will kick off the new season as the President of the United States in David Mamet’s scurrilous comedy November, a comic tour de force that features several members of the resident Company in a gleeful farce of political corruption.

The season also holds the return of master detective Sherlock Holmes in a new adventure by Jeffrey Hatcher, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club,based on “The Suicide Club” by Robert Louis Stevenson and characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Company Artist Todd Waite returns to a favorite role. This is the third time Mr. Waite has assayed the formidable sleuth, following his turns in Sherlock Holmes (2003) and The Crucifer of Blood (2009).

Throughout the season, Company artists and Alley favorites come together to transform themselves into the vivid characters of several contemporary classics. They rejoin Aaron Sorkin (following that author’s phenomenal Alley production of The Farnsworth Invention, 2009) in Sorkin’s revised version of the powerful A Few Good Men. Later in the season, Bernard Pomerance’s extraordinary The Elephant Man gets a stunning new production and playwright Katori Hall makes her Alley debut with The Mountaintop, a gripping new American play that is a re-imagining of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the eve of his assassination. Add to this, the return of playwright Kenneth Lin (the Alley’s premiere of his Intelligence-Slave was in 2010), with his marvelous new play Warrior Class, and rounding out the season is the 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, one of the most talked-about and enlivening new plays of the past 10 years.

November
By David Mamet

Neuhaus Stage
August 24 – September 23, 2012, Opens August 29, 2012

As the 2012 Presidential election campaign continues, David Mamet’s November offers audiences a fiendishly funny, over-the-top, no-holds-barred take on American politics. Unfolding in one day, just days before a national election and with poll numbers “lower than Gandhi’s cholesterol,” President Charles Smith (Alley Company Artist John Tyson), the most corrupt and inept buffoon to sit in the Oval Office, sets his sight on a second-term. With his usual acerbic wit and edgy social commentary, Mamet’s latest masterpiece is a gleeful cornucopia of corruption and political incorrectness full of shady backroom schemes like Thanksgiving turkeys awaiting pardon and an American Indian lobbyist who wants to turn Nantucket into a gambling resort that will leave you laughing out loud.

Recommended for mature audiences due to language and thematic content.

Death of a Salesman
By Arthur Miller

Hubbard Stage
September 28 – October 28, 2012, Opens October 3, 2012

The return to the Alley of Arthur Miller’s Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece could not be more relevant in a post-recession world. The play juxtaposes the American Dream with the realities of a fluctuating economy, unequal opportunities, and unfair advantages, with vivid characters and consummate theatricality. As salesman Willy Loman (Alley Company Artist James Black) approaches the end of his working life, he must reconcile his unrealized dreams while struggling against the current world.

The Mountaintop
By Katori Hall

Hubbard Stage
January 11 – February 3, 2013, Opens January 16, 2013

Taking place on April 3, 1968, The Mountaintop is a gripping re-imagining of events the night before the assassination of civil rights leader DR. Martin Luther King, Jr. After delivering one of his most memorable speeches, an exhausted Dr. King retires to his room at the Lorraine Motel while a storm rages outside. When a mysterious stranger arrives with some surprising news, King is forced to confront his destiny and his legacy to his people. The Mountaintop received the 2010 Olivier Award for Best Play and playwright Katori Hall won the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Clybourne Park
By Bruce Norris

Neuhaus Stage
January 18 – February 17, 2013, Opens January 23, 2013

Home is where the heart is as jokes fly and hidden agendas unfold in the same North Chicago house that was the setting for the 1959 classic, A Raisin in the Sun. In Houston native Bruce Norris’ 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning and Olivier Award winner for Best Play, Race is pitted against Real Estate. Two different generations of characters delicately dance around social politics as a white community in the 1950s splinters over the black family about to move in, and the roles reverse 50 years later with the start of gentrification. The razor-sharp satire explores the evolution of racism and how the date on the calendar may change but perceptions may not.

Recommended for mature audiences due to racially charged language.

A Few Good Men
By Aaron Sorkin

Hubbard Stage
March 1 – March 24, 2013, Opens March 6, 2013

Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball, The Social Network, The West Wing) returns to the Alley Theatre (The Farnsworth Invention, 2009) with the captivating courtroom drama. A Few Good Men is Sorkin’s first play, which ran for nearly 500 performances on Broadway in 1989, became an Oscar-nominated film in 1992, and was re-conceived for a 2005 London revival. Originally inspired by true events (Sorkin’s sister served with the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps [JAG]), this taut, tense thriller erupts when two Marines are accused of the hazing death of a fellow Marine at Guantanamo Bay. This hard-hitting, suspenseful story puts the Marine code of honor on trial.

Recommended for mature audiences due to language.

The Elephant Man
By Bernard Pomerance

Hubbard Stage
April 12 – May 5, 2013, Opens April 17, 2013

Tony Award-winning and Drama Desk winner, The Elephant Man, is based on the true story of the “elephant man,” so-called because of his hideous deformity. Its powerful and moving story chronicles the life of John Merrick, detailing his desperate existence in a Victorian freak show to his days as the toast of London high society. Pomerance weaves Merrick’s tale into a parable on beauty, innocence and human dignity.

Suitable for most audiences; some mature subject matter and brief nudity.

Warrior Class
By Kenneth Lin

Neuhaus Stage
May 3 – June 2, 2013, Opens May 8, 2013

Kenneth Lin returns to the Alley with his newest play, Warrior Class, as part of the Alley Theatre’s New Play Initiative, which facilitates the creative collaboration between playwrights, directors, actors, and designers during all stages of a new play’s development. In 2010, the Alley produced Lin’s world premiere of Intelligence-Slaveas part of its New Play Initiative. Warrior Classcenters on Julius Weishan Lee, a New York assemblyman who's been dubbed "The Republican Obama." Lee is the son of Chinese immigrants and a decorated war veteran with a seemingly limitless political career ahead of him. Then someone from his past threatens to reveal a college transgression, and Lee must decide how far he'll go to keep the incident out of the public eye. Whatever his decision, the consequences may be costly.

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club
By Jeffrey Hatcher
Based on “The Suicide Club” by Robert Louis Stevenson
and Characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Hubbard Stage
May 24 – June 23, 2013, Opens May 29, 2013

Based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club” and featuring beloved characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jeffrey Hatcher (Mrs. Mannerly, 2010) crafts a smart new Sherlock Holmes mystery. Having played Sherlock Holmes in The Crucifer of Blood (2009) and Sherlock Holmes (2003), Alley Theatre Company Artist Todd Waite will again play the iconic and illustrious detective in a spectacular, lavish production Dark forces may be manipulating the deaths of prominent men in a plot so far reaching that the fate of Europe is at stake. It is up to the brilliant Detective Holmes and his old friend Dr. Watson to uncover the chilling secret of the “suicide club.”

HOLIDAY PRODUCTIONS:

A Christmas Carol - A Ghost Story of Christmas
By Charles Dickens
Adapted and Originally Directed by Michael Wilson
Directed by James Black

Hubbard Stage
November 16 – December 24, 2012, Opens November 18, 2012

Houston's seasonal favorite the Houston Press described as having "Spectacular London sets ...the inimitable Dickens' tale - spiced with the usual fog and an unusual twist on the ghosts past, present and future." A Christmas Carol - A Ghost Story of Christmas follows Ebenezer Scrooge's journey with the three ghostly spirits that visit him on Christmas Eve. A Christmas Carol instills a powerful message about redemption and the spirit of the holiday season.
Recommended for general audiences.

The Santaland Diaries
By David Sedaris
Adapted for the stage by Joe Mantello
Directed by David Cromer

Neuhaus Stage
November 24 – December 30, 2012, Opens November 29, 2012

Company Artist Todd Waite reprises his role as "Crumpet the Elf" in the outlandish, and true, chronicles of David Sedaris' experience as a worker in Macy's SantaLand display. This compact, one-character comedy is an hilarious cult classic, featuring comic encounters during the height of the holiday crunch. NPR humorist and best-selling author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris has become one of America's pre-eminent humor writers.
Recommended for mature audiences due to language and subject matter.

ABOUT THE Alley Theatre
The Alley Theatre, one of America’s leading not-for-profit theatres, is a nationally recognized performing arts company that is focused on collaborating with resident actors, visiting artists, directors, designers, dramaturgs, and authors to cultivate the new voices, new work, and new artists of the American theatre. Under the direction of Artistic Director Gregory Boyd and Managing Director Dean R. Gladden, the Alley has also brought its productions to 40 American cities, and to Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, and New York’s Lincoln Center, as well as to major European festivals (including two in one season at the Venice Biennale), and Broadway. As a recipient of the Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, the Alley creates a wide-ranging repertoire and innovative productions of classics, neglected modern plays, and premieres, as well as new works that will become classics for the future developed through the Alley’s New Play Initiative. The Alley’s productions are built and rehearsed in the Alley Theatre Center for Theatre Production – a 75,000-square-foot facility adjacent to the theatres themselves and are performed on the 824-seat Hubbard Stage and the 310-seat Neuhaus Stage. The Alley continues to pave the way for Houston audiences to experience thought-provoking, diverse and transformative theatre produced and performed by its professional company year round.

Part of the Alley’s mission is to produce thought-provoking and diverse works that should be experienced by all. Theatre lovers can experience these plays for as little as $26 each! Season tickets may be purchased at alleytheatre.org, at the Alley Theatre Box Office, 615 Texas Avenue, or by calling 713.220.5700. Individual tickets will be available for purchase on August 27, 2012, at alleytheatre.org, at the Alley Theatre Box Office, 615 Texas Avenue, or by calling 713.220.5700. Groups of 10 or more can receive special concierge services and select discounts by calling 713.220.5700 and asking for the group sales department.

ActOUT is Houston's premiere group for GLBT theatre fans and their friends. Patrons enjoy pre-show mixers with fellow gay and lesbian subscribers, who gather to meet their favorite Alley artists and enjoy complimentary cocktails and appetizers. ActOUT events take place at the Alley for each Hubbard Stage production and are free with the purchase of a subscription or ticket to the show. For more information, call 713.228.9341 ext. 556. ActOUT dates for the 2012-2013 season are:

Death of a Salesman: Thursday, October 11, 7:30 p.m.
The Mountaintop: Thursday, January 24, 7:30 p.m.
A Few Good Men: Thursday, March 14, 7:30 p.m.
The Elephant Man: Thursday, April 25, 7:30 p.m.
Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club: Thursday, June 6, 7:30 p.m.

TALKBACKS
Alley patrons are invited to attend post-show TalkBacks with the cast and members of the artistic staff on select Tuesdays. These question-and-answer sessions are held immediately after the evening performance. Talkback dates for the 2012-2013 season are:

November: Tuesday, September 4, 7:30 p.m.
Death of a Salesman: Tuesday, October 9, 7:30 p.m.
The Mountaintop: Tuesday, January 22, 7:30 p.m.
Clybourne Park: Tuesday, February 5, 7:30 p.m.
A Few Good Men: Tuesday, March 12, 7:30 p.m.
The Elephant Man: Tuesday, April 23, 7:30 p.m.
Warrior Class: Tuesday, May 14, 7:30 p.m.
Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club: Tuesday, June 4, 7:30 p.m.

The Alley's $10 Tix program rewards patrons who bring a specified item for a designated charity with the opportunity to purchase up to two tickets in the B section for a minimum of $10 each. Purchase in person at the box office (615 Texas Ave.) on the designated day listed below, beginning at 11:00 a.m. Cash or check only. The partnering organizations for $10 Tix will be announced at a later date. Patrons may purchase tickets in person only to the Sunday preview matinee, the Tuesday preview performance or the first Thursday performance after opening night. Visit www.alleytheatre.org for more information. Alley Theatre $10 Tix dates for the 2012-2013 season are:

Death of a Salesman: Sunday, September 30
The Mountaintop: Sunday, January 13
A Few Good Men: Sunday, March 3
The Elephant Man: Sunday, April 14
Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club: Sunday, May 26

The Alley offers open-captioned performances for patrons with low hearing and audio described performances for patrons with low vision. Please visit www.alleytheatre.org or call 713.220.5700 for more information. Performances for the 2012-2013 season will be announced at a later date.

 

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