NEW YORK CITY: Manhattan Theatre Club‘s 2015–16 season begins this fall with the long-overdue Broadway premiere of an iconic American work, and continues with new plays by both new and familiar talents in its three New York spaces.
Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda will headline Fool for Love, Sam Shepard’s 1983 Magic Theatre and Off-Broadway hit about two lovers holed up in a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert (Oct. 8–Dec. 6), at MTC’s Broadway berth, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Director Daniel Aukin will rejoin the stars in a revival of last year’s Williamstown Theatre Festival production.
Next, in MTC’s Off-Broadway City Center Stage I space, will be David Lindsay-Abaire’s Ripcord (opening Oct. 20), a world premiere comedy about two rivals for a choice room in an assisted living facility. Holland Taylor, Marylouise Burke, and Rachel Dratch star; David Hyde Pierce directs.
Next, at the City Center Stage II, is Nick Jones’s world premiere comedy Important Hats of the 20th Century (opening Nov. 25), directed by Moritz Von Stuelpnagel, about a cutthroat rivalry between milliners in 1930s New York.
MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow will then direct Richard Greenberg’s new comedy, Our Mother’s Brief Affair, at the Friedman (opening Jan. 20, 2016), with Linda Lavin as a woman who makes a startling confession on her deathbed.
John Patrick Shanley’s Prodigal Son follows at City Center (opening Feb. 9, 2016). Shanley himself will direct this new drama about a brilliant, troubled young man from the Bronx at a New Hampshire private school. Robert Sean Leonard stars.
Frank Langella returns to Broadway in a new play by Florian Zeller, The Father (opening Apr. 12, 2016), translated from the original French by Christopher Hampton. The play, directed by Doug Hughes, is described as a trip through the mind of a man who may be a retired dancer or an engineer, and who may be visited by family or by strangers.
Hughes will also helm the season’s closing offering, by the young British writer Nick Payne (Constellations). In Incognito, at the City Center space (opening May 24, 2016), the stories of a pathologist, a seizure patient, and a nueropsychologist intertwine mysteriously.
UDPATE (Aug. 21, 2015): MTC has announced an additional play, to run in the spring of 2016 at one of its Off-Broadway spaces. British playwright Penelope Skinner’s futuristic The Ruins of Civilization will receive its U.S. premiere, with Lila Neugebauer tentatively slated as director.
