MILL VALLEY, CALIF.: Marin Theatre Company artistic director Jasson Minadakis and managing director Michael Barker have announced the 49-year-old theatre’s 2015–16 season. It features six plays, all to be staged in MTC’s 231-seat mainstage Boyer Theatre.
The season begins with the West Coast premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy (Sept. 10–Oct. 4), about an American child thought to be the reincarnation of Buddhist lama. The play was a recipient of Theatre Communications Group’s 2014 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, which funds extra time in the development and rehearsal of promising new plays.
The theatre will next stage the Bay Area premiere of Elizabeth Irwin’s My Mañana Comes (Oct. 29–Nov. 22) which was nominated for the 2015 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play for its 2014 Off-Broadway run, produced by the Playwrights Realm. This character study follows four busboys in an uptown New York City restaurant as they each dream of the future. Workshopped at MTC in April 2015, the play will receive its second production at San Diego Rep earlier in October.
MTC then continues its exploration of August Wilson’s Century Cycle with a production of Gem of the Ocean (Jan. 14–Feb. 7, 2016), set in 1900s Pittsburgh.
The world premiere of Rachel Bonds’s Swimmers follows (March 3–27, 2016). Recommended last year on the Kilroys List of unproduced or underproduced works by women, Bonds’s play follows a large ensemble cast through the seeming mundanity of a multilevel workplace.
Next is Howard Brenton’s revisionist Tudor history Anne Boleyn (April 14–May 8, 2016), in its West Coast premiere. Brenton imagines the executed would-be queen haunting King James’s effort to unite the English people, deeply divided along religious lines, by writing a definitive English-language version of the Bible.
Closing the season is the Bay Area premiere of Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand (June 2 – 26, 2016), about an American banker kidnapped by Pakistani militants and pressed into service as their financial advisor.
MTC will also offer theater series for young audiences, details to be announced in June.
