Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

News

Announcement of Rattlestick's 07-08 Season

We have a very ambitious season planned for 2007/08 with four new productions scheduled. In American Sligo, written and directed by Adam Rapp, Art “Crazy Train” Sligo, all-star wrestling legend, is about to retire. His two sons, his sister-in-law, his greatest fan, and a few unexpected guests gather on the eve of his final match for his last supper, but things just can’t seem to stop going wrong in the Sligo home. With his third Rattlestick production, Adam, the Obie-winning author of Red Light Winter, returns to direct this fierce new comedy featuring the all-star cast of Guy Boyd, Marylouise Burke, Michael Chernus, Megan Mostyn-Brown, Emily Cass McDonnell, Paul Sparks, and Matthew Stadelmann. Adam’s previous Rattlestick productions include Faster and Finer Noble Gases.

Our second show of the season will be Rag and Bone written by Noah Haidle, directed by Sam Gold. This is Noah’s debut Rattlestick production. His other plays include Mister Marmalade (Roundabout) and Vigils (The Goodman Theatre). In Rag and Bone, Jeff and George, mourning the death of their mother, struggle to make ends meet at the family ladder store, which George also utilizes as a front for the black market sale of human hearts, hearts bought and sold for people who either feel nothing or too damn much.

In January 2008, we will begin production on the third show, a special project with the Rikstheatern, Sweden’s national theater. We began a relationship with the Swedish Consulate during our Miss Julie project in 2005 and have been working to find a project together since then. We will be presenting War, written and directed by Lars Norén. Lars is Europe’s most produced living playwright and is the author of some fifty plays. In War, it is a year of ethnic cleansing. A mother and her two daughters, their father missing and presumed dead, think only of survival. When the father returns unexpectedly, they must confront a world gone completely wrong. Through this simple family tale, Norén creates a powerful human statement that becomes, through the use of multiple casts, a history of genocide in our century. In conjunction with this production, we will also be coordinating several roundtable discussions addressing various issues related to genocide in our age.

We will conclude our season with David Grimm’s Steve and Idi, which was part of our May 2007 Dirty Works workshop series. In this dark comedy, Steve’s life is spinning out of control. His work is going nowhere, his lover dumps him, his friendships are strained and, as if that’s not enough, the ghost of General Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator, bursts through his window with a very strange demand. David’s other works include Measure for Pleasure and Kit Marlowe, both produced by the New York Public Shakespeare Festival Theatre.

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