WASHINGTON, D.C.: Mosaic Theater Company of D.C. has announced its 2016–17 season, the company’s second.
“It’s absolutely amazing that we can talk about a second season for Mosaic and look at the unfolding of expanded horizons,” said founding artistic director Ari Roth in a statement. “We’re a start-up that started big and with a bang that now moves forward, broadening our focus tonally and thematically, embracing the comic and the clamorous. The voices heard in season two are muscular and musical, with all the verve and swagger and audacity of alternative communities, which comprise an expressive part of our Mosaic.”
The season will start with Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf (Aug. 25–Oct. 2), about one of Louis Armstrong’s final performances at the Waldorf Astoria in 1971. Craig Wallace will star, and Eleanor Holdridge will direct.
Next up will be Milk Like Sugar (Nov. 2–27), by Kirsten Greenidge, about a young girl pressured to join her friends in a pregnancy pact. Jennifer L. Nelson will direct.
Following will be Charm (Jan. 4–29, 2017), by Philip Dawkins. Inspired by real-life Miss Gloria Allen, the play is about a 67-year-old transgender woman who teaches at a center for homeless and LGBTQ youth in Chicago, Natsu Onoda Power will direct.
The season will continue with the world premiere of Hooded: Or Being Black for Dummies (Jan. 25–Feb. 19, 2017), by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm, a comedy about a prep school student and a drop out from inner-city Baltimore who meet in a holding cell where they are both detained. Serge Seiden will direct.
Next up will be Athol Fugard’s The Blood Knot (March 29–April 30, 2017), as part of Mosaic’s South Africa: Then & Now series, about a light-skinned black man “passing” as white by pretending to be brothers with his darker-skinned friend. Joy Zinoman will direct.
A Human Died That Night (April 7–30, 2017) will run in repertory with The Blood Knot. Adapted by Nicholas Wright from the book by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, the story is about an African psychologist’s gripping interrogations of Apartheid-era torturer and assassin Eugene de Kock.
Also part of the season will be the Voices From a Changing Middle East Festival, featuring Gilad Evron’s Ulysses On Bottles (May 18–June 11, 2017), about an Israeli-Arab ex-teacher, nicknamed Ulysses, who attempts to sail into Gaza on a raft made of plastic bottles during the fallout.
The festival will also include the American premiere of The Return (Oved Shabbat) (June 8–July 2, 2017), by Hanna Eady and Edward Mast, about the rising tensions between a Palestinian mechanic and a conflicted Israeli-Jewish woman at a run-down automobile repair shop in Herzliya.
Mosaic Theater Company of D.C., founded in 2015, is committed to producing socially relevant and transformative theatre from authors on the front lines of conflict zones.
