Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Drama, Comedy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
T2 finishes the season with a bang
Midway through a season that Artistic Director Bob Ford called “unmissable,” the TheatreSquared team leaves sold-out shows behind them and even more exciting theater events ahead of them.
“Season 12 has already been a record-setter for T2 — we’ve had more sold-out shows in the first half of the year than in our past two seasons combined,” says Executive Director Martin Miller. “It’s clear there’s a lot of excitement in Northwest Arkansas for great theater, and the word’s getting out.”
Part two of season 12 kicks off with Stephen Karam’s “The Humans,” a play The New York Times called a “piercingly funny, bruisingly sad comedy-drama.” The show received its Broadway debut just last year, won the Tony Award for Best Play and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Frequent T2 collaborator Shana Gold will direct.
“This is the show that was called the ‘best play of the year’ by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, NPR, the New York Times, Forbes, Time Out, New York Magazine — and the list goes on,” says Miller. “It won four Tonys in 2016, including Best Play. And we’re among the first theaters in the country to be able to produce it. Stephen Karam’s ‘The Humans’ is funny, existential, frightening, and just a great piece of theater.
“The Tony Award-winning playwright, Stephen Karam, will be in town for a special Artists’ Forum on Feb. 14 at the Fayetteville Public Library at 6 p.m.,” Miller adds.
Opening mid-March, Qui Nguyen’s “Vietgone” tells a story that hits close to home.
“Vietgone,” by El Dorado playwright Qui Nguyen, is an unlikely piece of theater best summed up by the New York Times headline — it’s a ‘refugee tale with laughs and rap,’” says T2’s co-founder Amy Herzberg of the play, which will be directed by Kholoud Sawaf. “It’s essentially a classic boymeets-girl story — except this boy and girl are refugees from the Vietnam war newly resettled in a relocation camp in Fort Chaffee, Ark. Believe it or not, it’s a comedy.”
Miller says Nguyen will also be making an appearance at a public event on a yet-to-be-determined date.
Mark Shanahan will direct “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” opening in late April.
“We’ll close out with an adaptation best described as Sherlock Holmes meets Monty Python: a sublimely funny, comic re-imagining of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’,” says Ford. “Mark Shanahan, who directed ‘Peter and the Starcatcher’ and ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ at T2, is returning to helm the show with some of our favorite, heartfelt comic actors. This one’s going to be a blast.”
In this rollicking comedy, three actors play more than a dozen characters.
“When I look at what’s coming in the next few months, I can’t imagine a better introduction for the folks just now discovering T2,” says Ford. “It’s fun to think that they’ll be able to say, once we’re in our new home, that they ‘were there when.’ Which is now!”