The Center Theatre Group has announced eight productions for its 2018–2019 season at the Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas Theatre, which will open with Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Sweat August 29–October 7 at the Mark Taper Forum. Nottage made her Broadway debut last year with the play that centers on rising tensions among a group of friends as layoffs begin to roll out in their working-class Pennsylvania town. Lisa Peterson will direct.
The world premiere of Luis Valdez’ Valley of the Heart, a California-set drama about a Mexican American and Japanese American family at the dawn of WWII, will follow, running October 30–December 9.
Linda Vista, the latest from August: Osage County playwright Tracy Letts, follows January 9–February 17, 2019. Dexter Bullard, who directed the play’s Steppenwolf world premiere last year, will return to stage the CTG production.
Tony Award winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson will return to his 2001 autobiographical solo play Lackawanna Blues, which will run March 5–April 21. Santiago-Hudson plays more than 20 characters in the coming-of-age play about his growing up in Lackawanna, New York.
CTG will also present Oscar winner Dianne Wiest in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, which will run May 15–June 30. James Bundt directs.
Jocelyn Bioh’s acclaimed Off-Broadway play School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play will open the Kirk Douglas Theatre season September 2–30. Tony winner Rebecca Taichman, who directed the New York premiere for MCC Theatre, will return for the Los Angeles premiere. The play, set within an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Ghana, was recently announced to return for an Off-Broadway commercial run.
Quack, playwright Eliza Clark’s world premiere play about Dr. Irving Baer, an authoritative daytime talk-show host with questionable ethics whose career and personal life hit the rocks after a news story about him goes viral, will run October 21–November 18. Neel Keller will direct.
From the Words and Writings of Dana H., a new play from Tony-nominated A Doll’s House, Part 2 playwright Lucas Hnath, will run May 26–June 23. Les Waters will direct the piece that dramatizes the real-life story of Hnath’s own mother—a nondenominational hospice chaplain who was held captive for five months by a mentally ill ex-convict.
CTG will also welcome the return of Gob Squad, with Creation (Pictures for Dorian), running October 18–21, and Mia Barron in a stage adaptation of Joan Didion’s seminal work The White Album. A collaboration with Lars Jan/Early Morning Opera, the piece will present two discrete, but interlocking performance works onstage together to mirror themes in Didion’s 1979 work that recounts her life in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Tickets are currently available by season ticket membership only. To purchase season memberships online, visit CenterTheatreGroup.org/Season.
