PORTLAND, ORE.: Artists Repertory Theatre has announced its 2017-18 season, including six plays and a theatrical event.
“Our 2017-18 season includes some of the most provocative, talked about, and acclaimed new plays in recent memory,” said artistic director Dámaso Rodríguez in a statement. “I am especially proud that Artists Rep will take on the challenge of producing the timely world premiere of Oregon playwright E.M. Lewis’s extraordinary epic Magellancia, a play with the immersive grip of a great novel. It will be an unforgettable theatre experience.”
The season will begin with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, which follows a black playwright who is trying to remount Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon.
Following will be Caught, by Christopher Chen, an exploration of truth and social justice through the lens of a Chinese artist who was imprisoned in a detention center for his art.
Next up will be The Humans, by Stephen Karam, about a family whose secrets unravel over Thanksgiving dinner.
The season will continue with the world premiere of Magellanica, by E.M. Lewis, about a group of scientists and engineers from around the world who convene in 1985 at the South Pole Research Station in Antarctica to figure out if there is a hole in the sky. The five-part immersive show will include four intermissions and a dinner break.
Following will be Between Riverside and Crazy, by Stephen Adly Guirgis, about a retired New York City policeman who is waiting for the verdict on his law suit against the police department as he hosts a revolving door of house guests in his rent-stabilized apartment.
Next up will be the world premiere of The Thanksgiving Play, by Larissa Fasthorse, about four mismatched artists who attempt to devise an ethnically-sensitive school play to celebrate Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Month.
The season will conclude with Lauren Gunderson’s I and You, about a teenage girl stuck at home due to an illness who is assigned to work with the school jock on a school project about Walt Whitman.
Artists Repertory Theatre, founded in 1982, produces provocative classic and contemporary plays.
