Magic Theatre: “Eva Trilogy” will open 2017-18 season.
Three of the four mainstage shows in Magic Theatre’s 2017-18 season will be world premieres, all of them developed through its Virgin Play Festival, the company has announced. The fourth title will be revealed at a later date.
The season will begin ambitiously in the fall, with “The Eva Trilogy” by Barbara Hammond. All three of its plays — “Eden,” “Enter the Roar” and “No Coast Road” — will be performed each night, all directed by artistic director Loretta Greco, who will be in her 10th year at the 51-yearold company. The epic triptych centers on a life-and-death decision by Irish expat Eva ( Julia McNeal) and its decades of aftermath.
In winter, John Kolvenbach will return to the Magic, writing and directing “Reel to Reel,” a memory play-qua-audio collage. The show chronicles the sweep of a decades-long marriage via fragments of recorded sounds, many of them banal bits of everyday conversation or domestic background noises. Veteran Bay Area actor Will Marchetti will star.
After an as-yet-unannounced show in the spring, the season will conclude with “The Gangster of Love,” written by pioneering Filipina playwright Jessica Hagedorn. A Magic Theatre commission, the show is based on Hagedorn’s autobiographical book of the same name, following Raquel “Rocky” Rivera as she and her family emigrate from Manila to the Haight in the 1970s. Greco will direct.
Full casting, as well as the titles in the 2017 Virgin Play Festival, will be announced at a later date.