ATLANTA: Actor’s Express has announced its 2018-19 season, featuring a world premiere from Steve Yockey and the return of Libby Whittemore.
“The new season at Actor’s Express really articulates the best of what we do,” said artistic director Freddie Ashley in a statement. “A Doll’s House, Part 2 and An Octoroon are two unbelievably smart plays that hold hands with the past while looking critically at the world we live in right now. Falsettos is as funny and touching a musical as has ever been written, movingly looking at what it means to form your own kind of family. Steve Yockey’s play Reykjavik is sexy, mysterious, and ultimately has huge emotional payoff—I have described it as Steve Yockey at his absolute Yockiest. And I believe Charly Evon Simpson is a major new voice in American playwriting. It’s so exciting to be presenting her beautiful, beautiful play Jump.”
The season will open with Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 (Sept. 1-30) as part of a co-production with Aurora Theatre. Fifteen years after Nora Helmer made the decision to leave her husband and family, she has come home, requesting an impossible favor from her husband. Freddie Ashley will direct.
Next up will be the world premiere of Reykjavik (Oct. 27-Nov. 18), by Steve Yockey. Told through eight interconnected vignettes beneath the glow of the Northern Lights, Yockey takes his audience on a journey through a world in which the supernatural is closer than they think. Melissa Foulger will direct.
Following will be Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (Jan. 26-Feb. 24, 2019). There’s trouble at the Terrebonne Plantation after Judge Peyton dies. Money is running out, an evil overseer is up to no good, and the heir to the estate is in love with someone he shouldn’t be in this 19th-century melodrama turned on its ear.
Next will be Falsettos (March 23-April 28, 2019), with music and lyrics by William Finn and book by Finn and James Lapine. Ashley will direct this musical about a modern family learning to navigate the stress of family dinners, the pressure of planning the perfect bar mitzvah and the heartbreak of saying goodbye.
Rounding out the season will be Jump (June 1-23, 2019), by Charly Evon Simpson. Fay comes to a bridge spanning a deep gorge looking for solace and a good place to vape. What she finds is a journey of self-discovery.
The season will also include the return of fan favorite Libby Whittemore for two engagements of her cabaret series Libby’s at the Express (Dec. 14-23, 2018 and May 2-5, 2019). The Atlanta icon returns for her 10th consecutive year.
Actor’s Express, founded in 1988, develops and produces new works and contemporary plays.
