PHILADELPHIA: Philadelphia Theatre Company has announced its 2018-19 season, the first under the new team of producing artistic director Paige Price and managing director Emily Zeck.
“I wanted my first full season with Philadelphia Theatre Company to focus on complex narratives and female characters who are reconciling their dreams with their realities,” Price said in a statement. “It’s our job as theatremakers to elicit empathy—to portray stories in a manner that makes audiences step into the shoes of the people they see onstage. And just maybe that translates to the real world.”
The season will open with the Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat (Oct. 12-Nov. 4). The play follows the story of a group of friends who work together in a factory in Reading, Pa., when layoffs begin to chip away at their trust and pit them against each other.
Next up will be the Philadelphia premiere of The Bridges of Madison County (Feb. 8-March 3, 2019). In this musical with a book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, an Italian woman has her quiet life upended when a National Geographic photographer pulls into her driveway seeking directions.
The final show of the season will be a world premiere production of Christina Anderson’s How to Catch Creation (March 22-April 14, 2019). Fifty years after a mid-1960s black queer feminist writer received unexpected news from her girlfriend, four individuals in San Francisco still feel the reverberations of that moment echoing in their lives.
Founded in 1974, Philadelphia Theatre Company strive to balance its Philadelphia roots with a national point of view to present entertaining and imaginative contemporary theatre focused on the American experience.
