HEDDA GABLER, GROUNDED & More Set for Gamm's 30th Anniversary Season

Tony Estrella, artistic director of The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm), has announced the theater's 30th anniversary season. A combination of classic and contemporary works, set over hundreds of years of world history, the 2014-2015 Season is an entertaining and evocative line-up that speaks as a whole to American society today.

"We're excited to celebrate our 30th anniversary season by traveling in time from the mid-14th century to the early 21st. This includes a world premiere medieval murder mystery and a one-woman tour-de-force about drone warfare," Estrella said. "Along the way, we peek into the palaces of revolutionary France, visit the home of a bored housewife in Victorian Norway, and witness the wild goings on in a Vietnam-era New York tenement."

Season 30 starts with the Rhode Island premiere of a new work by George Brant. An avalanche of a play, Grounded makes the security state and our war on terror personal and impossible to ignore. Then, for the first time since its 2010 hit run of A Doll's House, The Gamm returns to Henrik Ibsen with an unflinching look at the playwright's most complex heroine, Hedda Gabler. The new year opens with a thrilling world premiere, 10 years in the making! Morality Play, adapted for the stage by Tony Estrella from the best-selling novel by Booker-Prize winner Barry Unsworth, is historical fiction in the form of a Plague-time whodunit, with fascinating insights on the evolution of story telling. John Guare's comedy classic The House of Blue Leaves follows--a masterful commentary on American exceptionalism and the fine line between optimism and self-delusion.The season closes with Marie Antoinette, David Adjmi's alternately hilarious and shocking take on the 1% vs. the 99%.

Subscriptions to The Gamm's 2014-15 Season are $140-$235.

Call 401-723-4266. Information at gammtheatre.org.

SEASON 30 PLAY SYNOPSES

GROUNDED by George Brant (Sep 2014)

2014: The personal and the political are indistinguishable in American playwright George Brant's gripping one-woman play about a hot-rod fighter pilot whose unexpected pregnancy ends her career in the sky. Reassigned to fly remote-controlled drones in Afghanistan from a windowless, air-conditioned trailer near Vegas, "The Pilot" hunts terrorists by day and goes home to her family at night. But what happens when the boundaries blur between the desert in which she lives and the one she patrols? Suspenseful and searing, beautiful and blistering, Brant's multi-award-winning new play explodes our assumptions about modern warfare and unapologetically tells a story of our times.

HEDDA GABLER by Henrik Ibsen (Oct-Nov 2014)

1889: Hedda Gabler has returned from an extended honeymoon with her kind but tediously academic husband. Beautiful, self-possessed and also haunted, she is already bored of marriage. Suffocated by bourgeois society and disdainful of intellectual pursuits, she tries to fulfill her aimless desires by manipulating the fates of those around her...with tragic results. Offering no easy answers, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is a fascinating, paradoxical portrait of a woman slipping into despair as her options narrow in a world expanding for both sexes.

World Premiere! MORALITY PLAY adapted for the stage by Tony Estrella from the novel by Barry Unsworth (Jan-Feb 2015)

1361: A bone-chilling winter in England. The Black Plague, dormant for more than a decade, has returned with a vengeance. The Church rules the land, and a ragged troupe of actors accompanied by a renegade priest roam the countryside performing religious stories for the masses. But everything changes when a young boy is found dead and a mute girl stands to be hanged for the murder. Sensing a miscarriage of justice (and potential earnings!), the itinerant actors try to unravel the mystery by weaving the murder into their morality play. The result is a political morass fraught with danger for everyone involved. Adapted from the best-selling novel by Booker Prize Winner Barry Unsworth, Morality Play is a medieval murder mystery at the crossroads of sacred and secular-full of intrigue, suspense and lessons for our time.

THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES by John Guare (Mar-Apr 2015)

1965: Artie Shaugnessy, a zoo-keeper from Sunny Side, Queens dreams of moving to Los Angeles with his mistress, Bunny, and becoming a big-time songwriter. Meanwhile his wife, Bananas, is having a mental breakdown. Artie's son, Ronnie, is AWOL from the Army, stowing a home-made bomb, and planning to blow up the Pope on his first visit to New York City. Also visiting is Artie's old school chum, Billy Einhorn, now a Hollywood producer with industry connections. But will Artie's dreams of fame be swallowed up in the chaos of his ordinary life? Guare's prescient Vietnam-era black comedy about America's obsession with celebrity, revived on Broadway in 2011, is devastatingly hilarious and never timelier than in our age of reality TV.

MARIE ANTOINETTE by David Adjmi (Apr-May 2015)

1776: Marie's subjects used to love her-extravagant haute couture, three-foot-tall wigs, and all! But times are changing. A government in fiscal crisis and a populace railing against the super-rich mean France's frivolous and fashionable teen queen may soon be going out of style. From idle court gossip to gruesome beheading, American playwright David Adjmi's satirical new comedy is a fantastical slice in the life of the infamous monarch-a woman both captive and casualty of her unchecked appetites. Laugh-out-loud funny and hauntingly timely, Marie Antoinette reflects America today through the lens of 18th-century France.

Plays and dates are subject to change.

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