SOUTH PASADENA, CALIF.: Artistic director Lance Davis has announced Parson’s Nose Theater’s next season, its 16th. Along with condensed adaptations of classic novels, the theatre will be presenting plays by Molière and Shaw.
“This year, we’re talking about the power of family, the power of belief,” said Davis in a statement. “Belief in religion, belief in money, belief in love, belief in friendship, belief in country… what do you believe in? Five timeless comedies by our finest writers that will make you laugh and make you think.”
The season begins with Androcles and the Lion (Oct. 24–Nov. 22), George Bernard Shaw’s whimsical reworking of Aesop’s fable as an examination of mercy, modernity, and martyrdom.
Next is an adaptation of A Christmas Carol (Dec. 19–20), Dickens’s perennial holiday classic. The one-weekend production is the first of this season’s Reader’s Theatre Series.
School for Wives (Jan. 30–Feb. 28, 2016), the Molière farce that proved the inspiration for the 1962 musical comedy The Amorous Flea, will follow.
The Wind in the Willows (March 19–20, 2016), an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s allegorical children’s novel and the second production in Parson’s Nose’s Reader’s Theater Series, is next.
Rounding off the season is a full production of As You Were: Stories for GI’s in WWII (April 16–May 8, 2016), a collection of “knapsack stories and songs” for American servicemen, including adaptations of works by Mark Twain and O. Henry, as compiled by Alexander Woollcott, New Yorker contributor and inspiration for George S. Kaufman’s The Man Who Came to Dinner.
