Huntington’s new season includes ‘Leopoldstadt,’ two from ‘The Ufot Cycle’
Family will loom large as a theme of the Huntington’s 2024/2025 season, to judge by the slate of five productions the Boston theater company announced Tuesday. Two more shows will be announced at a later date.
So far, the season scheduled to kick off in mid-September will include “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s sprawling, Tony Award-winning drama about a Jewish family in Vienna whose lives are upended by the Nazis. The play was inspired by the experiences of Stoppard’s own family: All four of his grandparents and three of his mother’s sisters lost their lives in the Holocaust.
In a telephone interview, Huntington artistic director Loretta Greco said that “Leopoldstadt” is “fully personal and emotional in a way I’d never seen before from [Stoppard].” A co-production with Shakespeare Theatre Company that features a cast of 15 adults and three children, the play will be directed by Carey Perloff and run Sept. 12Oct. 13 at the Huntington Theatre, the company’s mainstage.
The Huntington is tackling “Sojourners,” and “The Grove,” the first two dramas of NigerianAmerican playwright Mfoniso Udofia’s planned nine-play, generation-spanning “The Ufot Cycle.” The cycle looks at the experience of Nigerian immigration in the United States through the eyes of the Ufot family.
“It is a diaspora story that is very different from most of the stories we’ve had in popular culture,” said Greco.
“Sojourners” is about a young Nigerian couple who immigrate to Houston in 1978 to attend graduate school. To be directed by Dawn M. Simmons, who helmed Lenelle Moïse’s “K-I-S-SI-N-G” last year, “Sojourners” will run Oct. 31-Dec. 1 at the Huntington Theatre.
In “The Grove,” set in 2009, the eldest, American-born Ufot daughter, who is gay, is “forced into a corner” by her parents, according to a description on Udofia’s website, compelling her to choose: “Will she uphold the desires of her parents and settle with a traditional Nigerian man? Or will she self-determine and pick her own love-match?”
Helmed by Awoye Timpo, who directed a Huntington production of Lydia R. Diamond’s “The Bluest Eye” two years ago, “The Grove” will run Feb. 7March 9, 2025, at the Wimberly Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion.
“Don’t Eat the Mangos,” by Ricardo Pérez González, is about three sisters in Puerto Rico who are caring for their ailing parents, and the “dark family secrets” that are spilled in the middle of a hurricane. (”Don’t Eat the Mangos” was presented by the small Apollinaire Theatre Company and Teatro Chelsea in 2022 at the Chelsea Theatre Works.)
Directed by David Mendizábal, the Huntington production of “Don’t Eat the Mangos” will be presented at the Wimberly Theatre from March 26-April 27, 2025.
“The Light in the Piazza,” a musical about a mother-daughter trip to Italy that proves to be transformative, features a book by Craig Lucas and a score by Adam Guettel. To be directed by Greco, “The Light in the Piazza” will run at the Huntington Theatre May 8-June 15, 2025.