Theatre Pro Rata Announces 2020-21 Season

Theatre Pro Rata's 2020-21 season will include three productions, written by women, directed by women, and featuring a predominantly female cast and crew, as part of The Jubilee, a national theater festival to produce plays written by traditionally excluded voices. More information about the initiative can be found at https://jointhejubilee.org/.

Top Girls, by Caryl Churchill. November, 2020

Top Girls was written in 1982 and first produced at The Royal Court Theatre in London. It explores the state of third-wave feminism as it continued, especially in the United States and other western countries. Set against Margaret Thatcher's Britain in the early 1980s and the evolving complexities of modern feminism, its all-female cast explores issues from varying perspectives, both historical and contemporary. In these voices from history and from the 1980s we can hear our current lives reflected: Times change, or do they?

Directed by Carin Bratlie Wethern.

Orlando, by Sarah Ruhl. March, 2021

In a magical dream of history, Orlando lives through time from Renaissance England to the twentieth century. First he is a beautiful and charismatic nobleman living a full life in Elizabethan London and falling in love with a Russian princess. Time is kind to Orlando and during a visit to Constantinople many years later an encounter leads to a transformation: Orlando becomes a woman and continues her adventures through several more centuries of challenges and passions. Sarah Ruhl's sexy and surprising play is based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, written as a celebration of her friend Vita Sackville-West.

Directed by Carin Bratlie Wethern.

Convent of Pleasure, adapted by Heather Meyer. June, 2021

*A postponement of the June 2020 world premiere production.*

A wealthy heiress rejects society's pressure to take a husband by building a cloistered utopia for unmarried women. She and the women vow to live new lives according to the heiress's own "principles of pleasure." Whoever said money can't buy happiness, didn't have enough money to try. Featuring Boo Segersin as Lady Happy and Leslie Vincent as Princess Principle, this is a new adaptation of the 1668 play written by "Mad Madge" aka Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle.

Directed by Nicole Marie Wilder.

Theatre Pro Rata will also continue its on-going play reading series with two readings during the run of each show. The readings are free and open to the public. Almost all TPR productions since 2008 were initially read during the play reading series.

All shows take place at The Crane Theatre, 2303 Kennedy St NE, Minneapolis