Long Wharf Theatre Announces 2012-13 Season: GOD OF CARNAGE, RIDE THE TIGER and More

Long Wharf Theatre, under the direction of Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Managing Director Joshua Borenstein, announces the slate of plays for its 48th season.

Subscriptions are currently on sale. Single tickets for the 2012-13 season will go on sale Wednesday, August 1.

“Our hope is to provoke laughter, shock, and thought, exploring what it means to be human in today’s complicated world. This coming year we’ll tell stories about family, legacy, race, politics, sex, (and eating too much.) From world premieres to modern classics, our upcoming season will surely bring special moments – moments of transformation and deeper understanding,” said Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein.

The season will begin with the world premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf, written by Terry Teachout, known for his groundbreaking biography of Louis Armstrong. “After I finished writing the book, I found that I had questions about Armstrong, and about this complex relationship with Joe Glaser, his longtime manager, that I simply couldn’t answer … Did he have any nagging doubts about the hard choices he’d made along the way? It struck me that a one-man play in which Armstrong looked back on those choices at the end of his life might prove to be very dramatic – and that it would be even more dramatic to have the same actor play Armstrong and Glaser. That’s how Satchmo at the Waldorf was born,” Teachout wrote on his blog.

God of Carnage, the hit comedy by Yasmina Reza, will take the Mainstage in November. This Tony Award-winning play about yuppie parents behaving badly was described by the New York Times as a “study in the tension between civilized surface and savage instinct,” has been a hit with audiences across the country.

Long Wharf Theatre’s Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting will direct the world premiere of January Joiner, a weight loss horror comedy, in January. We visit a weight loss boot camp where the denizens struggle with relationships, losing weight and, ultimately, themselves. Chicago playwright Laura Jacqmin has recently been honored with the 2008 Wasserman Prize, an award given to an emerging female playwright. Her work has been commissioned by South Coast Rep, Goodman Theatre, and Victory Gardens, among many others. “[Jacqmin] deftly weaves varied scenarios, both antic and increasingly dark, into a tight little knot of escalating expectations. And she has a talent for revealing the absurdities in grand topical issues,” said the Chicago Sun-Times on her work.

Tony Award-winner Judith Ivey returns to Long Wharf Theatre in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class in February. Curse marks the first time one of Shepard’s plays has been produced at Long Wharf Theatre. This OBIE Award-winning play, first produced in 1978, is part of Shepard’s family play trilogy, which includes Buried Child and True West. “The play’s undeniable power lies more (as in Greek tragedy) in its bleak evaluation of the human condition, its fertile symbols (the eerie blue light of the empty refrigerator that the characters keep opening), and the astonishing quality of its language,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

The quest for power is at the heart of the world premiere of William Mastrosimone’s Ride the Tiger, taking place in late March, directed by Edelstein. Mastrosimone, best known for his play Extremities, spent extensive time with the singer Frank Sinatra. It was through that research that he came upon his dramatic interpretation of the events leading up to the election of John F. Kennedy as president.

The 2012-13 season will conclude with a play that Edelstein feels is one of the most important written on race in the past decade: Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris. “Bruce Norris’ drama, however, is indisputably, uproariously funny, and a quietly evocative mediation on the by-no-means obsolete stereotypes that pervade millennial melting-pot America,” said Entertainment Weekly. Norris, who is also an actor, was inspired to write the play by the character of Karl Lindner, the racist minister in A Raisin in the Sun. He first saw the Lorraine Hansberry classic in 7th grade at his all white school in Houston. “For years I thought I wanted to play Karl Lindner but then as time went on I thought it’s really an interesting story to think about the conversation that was going on in the white community about the Younger family moving into Clybourne Park. It percolated for many years and that’s how I ended up writing this play,” Norris told the Steppenwolf Theatre.

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