The Theatre@Boston Court’s 2010 season to promote new work, and sharing
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Sharing the artistic cred -- and the risk -- of producing new plays is a guiding principle for the 2010 season at Pasadena’s The Theatre@Boston Court, which has announced four world premieres, three of them in cooperation with other theater companies.
It will be the Boston Court’s first season consisting entirely of world premieres.
The partner stage companies range from L.A.’s Circle X Theatre Co. to the National Asian American Theatre Company in New York, Oregon’s Portland Center Stage and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.
The playwrights offer geographical diversity as well: L.A. veterans Luis Alfaro (pictured) and Tom Jacobson, and newcomers Moby Pomerance from Great Britain and Jordan Harrison from New York.
Alfaro’s ‘Oedipus El Rey’ -- workshopped last year at the Getty Villa -- finds him again spanning the distance and millennia between Sophoclean Athens and Latino L.A., as he did in ‘Electricidad,’ staged at the Mark Taper Forum in 2005. This time, the king of the barrio isn’t a murdered gang lord, as in Alfaro’s loose adaptation of ‘Electra,’ but a live parolee who heads to East L.A. after serving time in the federal pen. ‘Oedipus El Rey’ opens Feb. 27 with Jon Lawrence Rivera directing -- a month after an inaugural run opens at the Magic Theatre but with a different director cast and crew.
Jacobson’s ‘The Twentieth-Century Way,’ opening May 8, combines his past interests in history and gay experience in a two-actor, multi-role play based on actual events from 1914 Long Beach -- an entrapment campaign against homosexuals frequenting public restrooms. The staging is by Michael Michetti, co-artistic director of the Boston Court.
Pomerance’s drama, ‘The Good Book of Pedantry and Wonder,’ focuses on a historical figure from the late 1800s, John Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Opening July 31, with John Langs directing, it’s a co-production with Circle X.
Words, words, words is again the subject in Harrison’s ‘Futura,’ concerning a not-too-distant all-electronic future in which they’ve ceased to exist on the printed page, with apparent psycho-spiritual consequences for a humanity plugged into a reality that’s insufficiently tangible and all-too-virtual. It opens Oct. 9, with Boston Court co-director Jessica Kubzansky directing and Portland Center Stage National Asian American Theatre Company sharing credit on the world premiere with separate, as yet unannounced productions.
-- Mike Boehm
