Aurora Theatre’s 2017-18 season

One world premiere, three Bay Area premieres and productions of Caryl Churchill and George Bernard Shaw plays will make up Aurora Theatre Company’s 2017-18 season.

The Berkeley company has announced that its 26th season will begin in September with two Bay Area premieres. First is Rebecca Gilman’s “Luna Gale,” about a social worker who takes an infant out of one unsafe situation into another she eventually realizes might be just as bad. Following that is Marco Ramirez’s “The Royale,” about Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion.

In January, the company revisits a script it first produced in 1997, George Bernard Shaw’s “Widowers’ Houses.” This satire, the first play the Irish master wrote, exposes the ways that even wellintentioned members of the privileged class necessarily help prop up an exploitative system. The new year continues with the company’s other classic for the season, Churchill’s “A Number,” which will be staged in the company’s smaller, upstairs space, Harry’s UpStage. This dystopian play, which premiered in 2002, examines the implications of cloning in a father-son relationship.

Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day” gets its world premiere at the Aurora in April, after having been developed in the company’s Originate + Generate newworks program. Debuting in 2016 as the new version of the Aurora’s Global Age Project, Originate + Generate is one of the only newworks incubators at a major theater in the Bay Area to have an explicit focus on local writers. In the play, Spector keeps the focus local as well: The piece explores the antivaccine movement in the Bay Area.

Concluding the season is the Bay Area premiere of Sarah Burgess’ “Dry Powder,” which like “Widowers’ Houses” earlier in the season lambastes the beneficiaries of capitalism. It centers on the moral dilemma of a financier who must decide at what point the profit motive must give way to compassion.

Directors and casting for all shows will be announced at a later date.