Everyman Theatre proudly presents its lineup for the upcoming 2019- 2020 season with a slate of offerings sure to enthrall audiences. This season features revered big-name revivals—award-winning plays seen through a fresh lens—as well as new works from some of today’s top playwriting talent.
In an effort to enrich and energize the audience experience, the theatre is boldly expanding, in both its lineup of 8 plays as well as a new theatre space located in the existing rehearsal hall on the second floor of Everyman.
Dubbed the Upstairs Theatre, the new performance space offers more intimate encounters while upholding Everyman’s legendary commitment to high-quality professional theatre. Everyman’s Resident Scenic Designer Daniel Ettinger has designed a semi-circular magical theatre—complete with a three-quarter thrust stage to further draw the audience into the world of the plays. It’s a beautiful mini amphitheater-style space with just 210 seats.
Everyman will open the Upstairs Theatre with a festival of new works running in repertory over the course of 7 weeks, beginning in March of 2020. The New Voices Festival showcases exciting writers without the name recognition their compelling works deserves. All three plays feature female playwrights, two of which are women of color.
The festival lineup kicks off with the world premiere presentation of the final play in Caleen Sinnette Jennings’s Queens Girl trilogy, entitled Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains, commissioned especially for Everyman. Berta, Berta, by Angelica Chéri will receive its second production, and Cry It Out, by Molly Smith Metzler, will round out the dynamic festival. Four of the eight plays in the season are new, and all the playwrights will come to Baltimore to see and work on these plays.
“During my tenure in the theatre, I’ve never seen a more vibrant pool of new voices in theatre,” states Founder and Artistic Director Vincent M. Lancisi. “The abundance of first-rate visionary new playwrights writing today is remarkable. When planning this season, I felt the need to provide a platform to introduce savvy Baltimore theatre-goers to these new treasures in our field.”
The five shows coming to the existing Downstairs theatre space include a revival of Proof, by David Auburn, August Wilson’s Radio Golf, the final work in his 10-play The American Century Cycle, and Awake and Sing!, the first Clifford Odets play to come to the Everyman Stage. A new stage adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express by Ken Ludwig promises to be the holiday hit of the season, and playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer is directing her work Be Here Now.
Everyman Theatre’s Complete Season Lineup:
PROOF
By David Auburn
Directed by Resident Company Member Paige Hernandez
September 3, 2019 – October 6, 2019
Catherine has inherited her late father’s house, hundreds of his notebooks, and his mathematical genius. Terrified she has also inherited his psychosis, she allows one of his devout students to comb through the writings. When he discovers a revolutionary proof in one of the notebooks, Catherine must face new questions from her past and risk, for the first time, revealing who she truly is to the world and herself. After her breakout role as Catherine in 2003, Everyman Resident Company member Megan Anderson returns to play Catherine’s older sister Claire in this “wonderfully funny… ambitiously constructed”(Variety) Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning modern classic.
AUGUST WILSON’S RADIO GOLF
Directed by Carl Cofield
October 15, 2019 – November 17, 2019
Successful real estate developer Harmond Wilks is on a mission to become Pittsburgh’s first black mayor by doing whatever it takes to transform his childhood neighborhood from blighted to bustling. But when he learns the truth about his family’s legacy, he is forced to decide whether he will finish what he started or fight to preserve his community’s history. This fast-paced, crackling conclusion to August Wilson’s unparalleled 10-play The American Century Cycle examining the African-American experience in the 20th century is “surprising, suspenseful, and crowd-pleasing” (The New York Times), and draws striking parallels to the issues we still face today.
AGATHA CHRISTIE’S MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS
Adapted by Ken Ludwig
Directed by Vincent M. Lancisi
December 3, 2019 – January 5, 2019
Board the exotic Orient Express as it takes off into the opulence and grandeur of the 1930s, with a train full of suspects, and an alibi for each one. This dazzling new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s masterpiece from comedic master Ken Ludwig is filled with twists, turns, and larger-than-life characters. Wax your mustache and bring your family as detective Hercule Poirot solves the perfect murder mystery this holiday season.
BE HERE NOW
Written and Directed by Deborah Zoe Laufer
January 21, 2020 – February 16, 2020
Bari rolls her eyes at yoga classes, doesn’t see the point in dating, and just got fired from teaching nihilism in New York. Now back in her rural hometown, her despair has reached new levels—and so have her recurring headaches. Somehow they are giving her bizarre, almost religious experiences that are making her feel… happy… ecstatic… and in love? They’re also killing her. Now, Bari must decide whether it’s better to live a short, joyful life, or risk a lifetime of depression. From acclaimed playwright, Deborah Zoe Laufer, Be Here Now is a comedic look at what we’re willing to do for love and happiness and to create meaning in our lives.
AWAKE AND SING!
By Clifford Odets
Directed by Noah Himmelstein
May 26, 2020 – June 28, 2020
In a crowded Bronx apartment, three generations of the working-class Berger family struggle against the odds during the Great Depression to make ends meet while keeping their dreams for tomorrow alive. Gritty, funny, and full of soul, Awake and Sing!—originally performed by the renowned Group Theatre—is considered Clifford Odets’s finest work. It beautifully captures the ambitions and heartaches of a Jewish immigrant family who must weigh the costs of holding onto an enduring belief in the American dream. Almost a century after it was written, it remains profoundly relevant.
NEW VOICES FESTIVAL
QUEENS GIRL: BLACK IN THE GREEN MOUNTAINS
By Caleen Sinnette Jennings
Directed by Resident Company Member Paige Hernandez
March 3, 2020 – April 12, 2020
A world premiere production commissioned by Everyman Theatre, the third and final installment of Jennings’s award-winning Queens Girl series reunites Resident Company Members Paige Hernandez as director and Dawn Ursula as the indomitable Jacqueline Marie Butler. As the Vietnam War rages and the Kent State killings ignite college campuses across the country, Jackie arrives in Vermont to begin college. Caught between wildly divergent sets of friends—outrageously wealthy “WASPS”, militant black activists, and passionate theatre students—Jackie is forced to confront the space between white and black culture to find her place in the world.
BERTA, BERTA
By Angelica Chéri
Directed by Reginald L. Douglas
March 17, 2020 – April 26, 2020
Mississippi, 1920. Leroy returns to the doorstep of his long-lost lover, Berta, covered in blood after committing a shocking crime. With his freedom in the balance, the clock is ticking for him to make amends. As their quarrelsome beginning transforms into an impassioned consummation of their love, can the inevitability of his fate be averted? As one of last season’s standout hits at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Berta, Berta is a “riveting, gut-wrenching fable“ (DC Metro Theatre Arts) that weaves an intimate, epic love story, inspired by the prison work song, “Berta, Berta.”
CRY IT OUT
By Molly Smith Metzler
Directed by Vincent M. Lancisi
March 31, 2020 – May 3, 2020
2 a.m. feedings, dirty diapers, and other hazards of new motherhood are enough to give anyone sleepless nights. This no-holds-barred comedy from award-winning writer Molly Smith Metzler (Shameless, Orange is the New Black) holds both a microscope and a megaphone to the joys and perils facing new parents today, whether you’re Ivy educated or working through night school.
Join Jessie and Lina in their Long Island backyards, where the wildly different but equally difficult parenting decisions facing each mother—and the neighbors in the mansion up on the cliff—”is worth your attention, whether you are a member of the mommy brigade or not” (Broadway World).
Everyman Theatre 2019/20 Season Subscriptions ($75-$414) are now available online, by phone (410) 752-2208, or at the Everyman Theatre Box Office – 315 W. Fayette Street, in Baltimore, MD and include savings for seniors, first-time subscribers, students, and people under 40.
