HOUSTON: Catastrophic Theatre has announced the lineup for its 13th season, featuring a comedy by Will Eno, one of Maria-Irene Fornes’s signature works, and the 22nd installment of Tamarie Cooper’s original musical series.
“This is our most meticulously planned season in decades,” co-artistic director Jason Nodler said in a statement, “and it has just about everything in it: a return to legendary American playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, and Will Eno; the first Houston production of a play by the remarkable Clare Barron, who is not so much emerging as exploding; and a brand-spanking-new musical from Houston theatre icon and Catastrophic co-artistic director Tamarie Cooper. Five amazing plays and every single performance is pay-what-you-can. What’s not to love?”
The season will open with Tragedy, a Tragedy (Sept. 27-Oct. 20), a comedy by Will Eno. In the play, a team of broadcasters reveal themselves to be all too human when reporting live on an unfolding crisis.
Next up will be Clare Barron’s Baby Screams Miracle (Nov. 22-Dec. 15), about a family clinging to prayer and forgiveness during a powerful storm that engulfs their home.
The season will continue in the new year with The Book of Grace (Feb. 14-March 8, 2020) by Suzan-Lori Parks. In a small Texan border town, a waitress encourages her border patrol agent husband’s son to return home and reunite with his father. What ensues is a battle for power, revenge, and release from past traumas.
Following will be Maria-Irene Fornes’s Fefu and Her Friends (April 3-26, 2020). Set in the 1930s, a group of eight women gather at the country home of their brilliant and eccentric friend. As multiple conflicts unfold between the old friends, the women struggle to define who they are and what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society.
The season will close with Tamarie 20/20 (June 25-August 9, 2020) by Tamarie Cooper and friends. In the new musical, Tamarie’s seeing things, inviting audiences to be a witness of visions of her past, her future, her next meal, motherhood, marriage, and sex, all filtered through Tamarie’s twisted, musical-theatre loving brain.
Formed in 2007 by Jason Nodler and Tamarie Cooper, the Catastrophic Theatre is a creator and producer of new work for the theatre in Houston.
