Azuka Theatre Company Opens Season with Jordan Harrison's ACT A LADY

Azuka Theatre opens its season with a hilarious and clever comedy from company and Philadelphia theatre community favorite Jordan Harrison. Act A Lady is set to debut the Off-Broad Street consortium's new space, at First Baptist Church, 17th and Sansom Streets. This Philadelphia Premiere begins previews Thursday, November 3rd, opens Wednesday November 9 at 7 p.m., and closes Sunday November 20th. Tickets cost $ $15.00 - $27.00. Subscriptions and more information are available online at www.azukatheatre.org or by calling (215) 733-0255.

Jordan Harrison has become a popular playwright in Philadelphia. Azuka had a widely acclaimed hit in 2008 with the Philadelphia premiere of Harrison's Kid Simple. Last season, the Arden Theatre Company had a huge hit and recently garnered multiple Barrymore Award Nominations with the World Premiere of The Flea and the Professor, for which Harrison wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics. Act a Lady began its journey in 2005 as part of PlayPenn, Philadelphia's new play conference.

"I first saw Act a Lady when it debuted at the Humana Festival in Louisville in 2006 and thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen," says Azuka Theatre's Producing Artistic Director Kevin Glaccum. "However, I initially thought it would never work for Azuka. I thought the show was too big for our company. However, Azuka's Literary Manager Allison Heishman encouraged me to look at the play again. Once I re-read it, I found it was simpler then I had remembered. Now, I am particularly excited to be launching our new home with this play and all of its wonderful observations on the human condition."

In Act A Lady, Harrison takes audiences into a Prohibition-era small town in the American Midwest. When the men of the town decide to put on a play dressed in "fancy-type, women-type clothes," the whole community is affected: gender lines blur, eyebrows raise, identities explode, and life and art are forever entangled. The piece is a thoughtful and exuberant fable about the woman in every man, the man in every woman and the power of theatre to uncover both.

Glaccum will direct a stellar cast that includes Mike Dees, Jamison Foreman, Matt Tallman, Amanda Schoonover, Meghan Slater and Leah Walton. Dees, Forman, and Tallman, play the men in the community who take the plunge and perform as women, Megan Slater and Leah Walton play the women in the community and Amanda Schoonover plays Zinna the director who challenges the perceptions of everyone in town. This will be Schoonover's eighth production with Azuka. She earned raves as the lead in Azuka's production of Harrison's Kid Simple.

All four designers for the show are returning to Azuka. Most recently, Daniel Perelstein designed the sound , Josh Schulman designed the lights and Alisa Sickora Kleckner designed the costumes for last season's hit the terrible girls. Meghan Jones' designed the suburban subdivision for Azuka's Philadelphia premiere of Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom.

Jordan Harrison is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. He has received commissions from Arden Theatre, Ars Nova, Berkeley Rep/Actors Theatre of Louisville, Cypress Films, the Guthrie Theater/Children's Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, and South Coast Rep. Harrison is the recipient of the 2008 Kesselring Fellowship, the Frederick Loewe Award, a Theater Masters' Innovative Playwright Award, the Heideman Award, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships from The Playwrights' Center, and a NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence Grant with The Empty Space Theatre. He is a graduate of the Brown University MFA Creative Writing program, he is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.

 

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