Shepard, Hwang, Rea, 'Hair,' Etc. Part of New Public Season

The Public Theater's Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Executive Director Mara Manus announced today the lineup for its 2007-08 season: seven exciting new productions that will mark the return of three of The Public's most-produced playwrights and introduce several emerging new voices to Public Theater audiences. 

Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis said, "This season reflects the scope of The Public's mission: new work from our most celebrated writers, exciting new plays by writers just bursting into life, collaborations with groundbreaking experimental ensembles, world-class Shakespeare, world premieres, and intimate stages filled with our country's greatest actors. It's a season as vital and diverse as New York." 

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard returns to The Public to direct the U.S. premiere of Kicking a Dead HORSE, a new play about the myth of the West, featuring Stephen Rea. Tony Award winner David Henry Hwang returns this fall with Yellow Face, a world premiere production developed with the Center Theatre Group.  Directed by Leigh Silverman, Yellow Face is "a biting new satire about ethnicity and cultural identity," state press notes.  This winter, Obie Award winner Caryl Churchill brings to The Public the U.S. premiere of Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, "a bold new play staged in collaboration with The Royal Court Theatre.  This two person play once again reveals Churchill's uncanny ability to write both topically and elliptically at the same time." Sam Shepard's last play at The Public was Simpatico (1994); David Henry Hwang and Caryl Churchill return after their 1996 productions of Golden Child and The Skriker, respectively.

The Public will also stage the world premiere of Tony Award winner Richard Nelson's new history play, Conversations in Tusculum, featuring Brian Dennehy, David Strathairn, and Maria Tucci. Set outside of Rome in the villas and hillsides of Tusculum, the play chronicles those entangled in Julius Caesar's world of manipulation and power. 

In addition to new works by these established playwrights, the 2007-2008 season will continue to affirm and build upon The Public's historic role as a home for independent and experimental artists.  The legendary Wooster Group will make its Public Theater debut with its production of Hamlet, a wildly inventive take on Shakespeare's best-known tragedy.  In development since 2005, Hamlet will officially open at The Public this season.  

Reuniting the writer/director team behind The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and Jesus Hopped the A Train, The Public Theater will co-produce with LAByrinth Theater Company Stephen Adly Guirgis' new play Little Flower of East Orange, directed by Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman.  LAByrinth Theater Company enters its fifth season of residency at The Public.

"Tarell Alvin McCraney's The Brothers Size is a compelling new play about the fate of two brothers in which the audience is both witness and judge." The Brothers Size will have a full production and run this season after a successful presentation at Under the Radar 2007, the Public's critically acclaimed annual theater festival.  "A recent graduate of Yale, Tarell Alvin McCraney is one of the most thrilling wordsmiths to emerge in the American theater in the last decade."

Under the Radar will enter its fourth year in 2008, continuing to showcase cutting-edge theater from around the world on the many stages of The Public.  

The 2007-08 season will also feature the return of New Work Now!, the popular free readings series that showcases new works and globalFEST, an all-star musical performance event at Joe's Pub featuring the latest in world music, co-produced by The Public Theater, World Music Institute and World Music/Crash Arts, Boston.

Suzan-Lori Parks' ambitious playwriting experiment "365 Days / 365 Plays" continues through November with free presentations at The Public on the first Sunday of every month. 

A Midsummer Night's Dream, the second production of the Shakespeare in the Park "Summer of Love," plays August 7 through September 9, and the return of Joe's Pub in the Park, September 19 to September 30, will include three FREE concert presentations of the much-loved musical Hair, September 22-24.

A full listing of the 2007-08 Season follows:

The Wooster Group
Hamlet
New York Premiere/Fall
Presented by The Public Theater in association with Arts at St. Ann's
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte
With Dominique Bousquet, Ari Fliakos, Alessandro Magania, Daniel Pettrow, Scott Shepherd, Casey Spooner, Kate Valk, Judson Williams
"The legendary Wooster Group is the most widely-renowned and acclaimed experimental ensemble of its time. With their trademark use of video, sound and precise physical language, the Wooster Group takes on Shakespeare as you've never seen it before – a wildly inventive, not-to-be missed artistic event."

The Brothers Size
World Premiere/Fall
Co-produced with The Foundry Theatre
Written by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Directed by Tea Alagic
"Playing fast and loose with West African myths, The Brothers Size brings contemporary rhythms together with traditions of ceremonial presentation to tell the modern-day story of the Size brothers – Ogun, an auto mechanic and Oshoosi, a recent parolee.  This breakout hit from The Public's 2007 Under The Radar Festival is an imaginatively fresh new drama, in which the audience is at once the community, the witness and the judge."

Yellow Face
World Premiere/Fall
Co-produced with Center Theatre Group
Written by David Henry Hwang
Directed by Leigh Silverman
With Julienne Hanzelka Kim, Kathryn Layng, Hoon Lee, Tony Torn
"David Henry Hwang puts himself center stage with alter-ego DHH, telling his side of the explosive controversy stirred up when he led the protest against the hiring of Jonathan Pryce in the original Broadway production of Miss Saigon. Truth and fiction are hard to separate as Hwang gives us a funny and moving backstage look at his search to confront the roles that race and ethnicity play in America."

Conversations in Tusculum
World Premiere/Winter
Written by Richard Nelson
With Brian Dennehy, David Strathairn, Maria Tucci 
"The country you love and the values it represents are being destroyed by a misguided leader. You can continue to live in relative comfort by not involving yourself, or you can take action to save the democracy you love. Set outside of Rome in the villas and hillsides of Tusculum, Richard Nelson continues his revelatory exploration of history with a new play that chronicles those entangled in Julius Caesar's world of manipulation and power."

Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?
U.S. Premiere/Spring
Co-produced with The Royal Court Theatre
Written by Caryl Churchill
Directed by James Macdonald
"Jack would do anything for Sam.   Sam would do anything.  Don't miss the ground-breaking new play by one of theatre's preeminent voices."   
Little Flower of East Orange
World Premiere / Spring
Co-produced with the LAByrinth Theater Company
Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis 
Directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman
"The Public Theater and LAByrinth Theater Company join forces to reunite the powerhouse writer/director team behind such groundbreaking urban dramas as The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and Jesus Hopped the A Train. Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis and director Philip Seymour Hoffman bring us their latest collaboration, an inter-generational ghost story set in an upper Manhattan charity hospital."

Kicking a Dead Horse
U.S. Premiere/Summer
Co-produced with The Abbey Theatre (Ireland)
Written and directed by Sam Shepard
With Stephen Rea
"We are proud to welcome back one of the American Theater's greatest treasures and an artist deeply rooted in The Public's history. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Academy Award nominee Sam Shepard brings us an arresting new play about the myth of the West, a Manhattan art dealer and a dead horse. Featuring Academy Award and Tony nominee Stephen Rea."

Visit www.thepublictheater.org for more information on The Public Theater.

Photo - Stephen Rea