On tap at the Taper in 2016
The Mark Taper Forum will foray into minefields in 2016 with a lineup of socially aware works
Religious and racial issues will figure into the theater’s lineup of plays.
The 2016 season of the Mark Taper Forum won’t premiere any new work, but it will venture persistently into minefields where divisions between religious and racial allegiances detonate drama.
The exception is the season-closing play, a revival of Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” an acid comedy in which the fact that all the characters are Irish Catholics is no bulwark against a devastating outcome.
“It is not a mellow season,” Michael Ritchie, artistic director of the Taper’s parent organization, Center Theatre Group, noted Tuesday in announcing the five-show season.
The plays include “Disgraced,” Ayad Akhtar’s 2013 Pulitzer Prizewinning drama about a Pakistani American corporate lawyer (June 19July 17, 2016) and Suzan-Lori Parks’ three-hour Civil War epic, “Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 and 3),” which premiered in 2014 and follows the trajectory of a slave who goes off with his master to serve the Confederacy (April 19-May 15).
The other recent play is “The Mystery of Love & Sex” (Feb. 21-March 20), in which Bathsheba Doran constructs a mainly comic scenario around all manner of racial, religious, generational and sexual twists embodied by a young black man and white woman who’ve invited her parents for a meal in the college dorm room the younger pair share.
In addition to the 1996-vintage “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” (Nov. 16-Dec. 18), a touring production by the Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland, staged by its artistic director, Garry Hynes, the Taper will revive August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (Sept. 11Oct. 16, 2016). Phylicia Rashad will direct the 1982 drama, set against a backdrop of Jim Crow racism, in which a 1920s Chicago recording session by the great blues singer and her band turns explosive.
It’s the only play in Wilson’s great 10-play “cycle” about the 20th century African American experience that is not set in the Pittsburgh neighborhood where he grew up. After “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Center Theatre Group will be one play shy of touching all of Wilson’s bases — omitting only “Fences,” a drama about a seething ex-ballplayer that is currently playing at International City Theatre in Long Beach.
The three recent plays the Taper will present all will be West Coast premieres. Two will be staged by directors who already have tackled them on multiple stages elsewhere.
“Disgraced” will be directed by Kimberly Senior, who previously shepherded the play from its 2012 premiere at the American Theater Company in Chicago through New York City runs off- and on Broadway. It depicts an upscale Manhattan dinner party that goes awry when the conversation turns to radical Islam and religious differences between Islam and Judaism — hot-button topics for the host, a lapsed Muslim.
Jo Bonney, who oversaw the development of “Father Comes Home From the Wars” at New York’s Public Theater, will direct its Taper production. Parks uses Homer’s “The Odyssey” as a mythic template for her saga. She has said the complete work eventually will encompass nine parts that play out over three evenings.
Veteran L.A. director Robert Egan will stage “The Mystery of Love & Sex.”
The plays by Parks and Doran both found a big fan in New York Times critic Charles Isherwood, for whom “Father Comes Home From the Wars” was “endlessly stimulating.” He wrote that “The Mystery of Love & Sex,” which starred Tony Shalhoub and Diane Lane in a Lincoln Center Theater production early this year, was “perfectly wonderful” and “beautifully wise.”
Center Theatre Group is selling season subscriptions for $165 to $419; tickets for individual shows typically go on sale about seven weeks before the opening.