Sock puppets and vampires
The Alley’s 2016-17 season includes provocative productions
Alley Theatre artistic director Gregory Boyd stares at a sock puppet in his office and thinks to the season ahead.
The puppet will star in “Hand to God,” an Alley production that opens in August. Playwright Robert Askins grew up in Cypress and was a regular Alley attendee. For the play, he drew from his own youth working with his mother’s Christian puppet ministry in Cypress. In his play, the foul-mouthed puppet takes on a life of its own, causing complications in the community.
“I thought he made up the idea of puppet ministry,” Boyd says. “But he did not. He’s just an amazing, interesting, talented and powerful writer who spent his youth studying theater and working in theater. I’m excited to introduce him to the Alley’s audience.”
Askins moved to New York and worked as a bartender, while most of his plays went unproduced. But a noted producer picked up “Hand to God” and brought it to Broadway, changing Askins life in the process. Now his “Hand to God” — described by the New Yorker as “‘Sesame Street’ meets ‘The Exorcist’” — will open the Alley’s 2016-17 season, the first of a dozen productions.
“Hand to God” will be the only sock puppet production in a season that includes a world premiere, two classics separated by 350 years, a new musical, a collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland, some mystery, some comedy, some pointed commentary and a pair of holiday staples.
Boyd credits the theater’s $46.5 renovation with allowing for so many varied productions.
“In 1968, when the theater was built, scenery wasn’t fashionable,” he says, laughing. “Now, we can have bigger productions, musical productions, things that we couldn’t do before, and with far fewer dark nights.”
The season’s world premiere will be “Syncing Ink,” an autobiographical play written by Baltimore native NSangou Njikam about hip-hop and identity. It will be directed by Niegel Smith, the artistic director of the Flea Theater in New York.
“NSangou and Niegel are two absolutely fantastic talents in theater,” Boyd says. “Imagine coming across a young Mike Nichols or a young Stephen Sondheim. NSangou is that kind of huge talent, and so positive in his outlook. It’s a great, theatrical piece about storytelling.”
Mary Rodgers’ 1972 body-swapping book “Freaky Friday” has been made into a film twice. A musical version of the story — with a book by Bridget Carpenter and music and lyrics by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey — makes its world premiere in Washington, D.C., this fall. The Alley brings it to Houston in June 2017. Carpenter is a playwright and writer who worked on TV’s “Friday Night Lights.” Kitt and Yorkey won a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for their musical “Next to Normal.”
As for the classics, the older of the two is part of a larger celebration of William Shakespeare on the 400th anniversary of his death. The Alley will perform “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — Shakespeare’s beloved comedy populated by lovers, actors and fairies — in October.
“The question with ‘Midsummer’ is how do you rediscover it? How do you find in it something fresh?” Boyd says. “Most productions try to solve that problem by working with the fairies first. Big bright ideas about the fairies: Do you set it on the moon? Do you dress them like the 1947 Yankees. But that’s giving short shrift to the play. And then the play doesn’t come across. It’s such a great love song to the theater and the idea of the theater, so I think we’ll find something that will seem fresh to people who know the play well.”
The play’s monthlong run will be accompanied by other Shakespeare-related events, including readings of other plays, evenings of sonnets and songs and outreach to local schools.
In April 2017, the Alley will present “A View From the Bridge,” which follows productions of other Arthur Miller plays “Death of a Salesman” in 2012 and “All My Sons” in 2015. More than a half-century old, Miller’s play maintains its resonance with thematic content about immigration and sexual identity.
“We talk about Miller as a classic, but when these shows opened they were like bombs going off in the culture,” Boyd says. “But even later, there’s been nothing like ‘All My Sons.’ People, especially in Houston who had the experience of the Challenger disaster, look at it and can’t believe when it was written. Which is the mark of a timeless play. In the same way ‘A View From the Bridge’ deals with a crisis of conscience and national argument that is still central today.”
Another big production in the upcoming season is “Let the Right One In.” The National Theatre of Scotland will bring Jack Thorne’s adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, about a young boy and his relationship with a child vampire, in March 2017. Boyd calls it “a beautiful, stunning, chilling and striking production. One of the best things I’ve seen, internationally, in the past five years.”
Sarah Burgess’ “Dry Powder,” which played at the Public Theater in New York, is a comic condemnation of questionable business ethics. It plays early next year. The season wraps in summer 2017 with “A Night With Janis Joplin,” which had been a success for the Alley in an earlier production.
“It’s incantatory in its love of rock ’n’ roll and what she represented,” Boyd says.”And she’s also the famous first daughter of Port Arthur, so there’s homegrown enthusiasm that has only gotten stronger since we did it a few seasons ago.”
Casting, he admits, proves difficult for that show.
“Janis never had to do a show like this eight times a week.”