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MainStage 2019 - 2020
Announcing Southern Rep’s upcoming season!
2019 - 2020 Mainstage Season
The 2019-20 Mainstage Season, Southern Rep’s 33rd, will feature Regional Premieres of AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY by Tracy Letts, NATIVE GARDENS by Karen Zacarías, and Bertolt Brecht’s MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN, translated by Ntozake Shange. In addition, back by popular demand and updated for the holiday season will be MANDATORY MERRIMENT: A NEW ORLEANS HOLIDAY MUSICAL created by Leslie Castay and Ian Hoch. The season will also feature the NNPN (National New Play Network) Rolling World Premiere of REYKJAVIK by Steve Yockey (in partnership with the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival), and the home-grown World Premiere of CHEMIN DU BAYOU, by local New Orleans playwright Pamela Davis-Noland.
“This season is filled with eclectic and remarkably funny plays, and even our dramas disarm with humor while digging into the darker and deeper emotional wells of our humanity. Focusing on the different kinds of joy we experience as humans—whether it be through gardening, food, drink, sex, dancing, love, family—is exactly the kind of theatre we want to make this season.” – Aimée Hayes
By Tracy Letts
Directed by Jason Kirkpatrick
September 11 – October 6, 2019
Regional Premiere
A vanished father. A pill-popping mother. Three sisters harboring shady little secrets. When the large Weston family unexpectedly reunites after Dad disappears, their Oklahoman family homestead explodes in a maelstrom of repressed truths and unsettling secrets. Mix in Violet, the drugged-up, scathingly acidic matriarch, and you’ve got a major play that unflinchingly—and uproariously—exposes the dark side of the Midwestern American family.
By Karen Zacarías
Directed by Helen Jaksch
October 30 – November 17, 2019
Regional Premiere
You can’t choose your neighbors. In this brilliant new comedy, cultures and gardens clash, turning well-intentioned neighbors into feuding enemies. Pablo, a rising attorney, and doctoral candidate Tania, his very pregnant wife, have just purchased a home next to Frank and Virginia, a well-established D.C. couple with a prize-worthy English garden. But an impending barbeque for Pablo’s colleagues and a delicate disagreement over a long-standing fence line soon spirals into an all-out border dispute, exposing both couples’ notions of race, taste, class and privilege.
A NEW ORLEANS HOLIDAY MUSICAL
Created by Leslie Castay and Ian Hoch
Book by Ian Hoch
Directed by Leslie Castay
Music Direction by Alan Payne
December 4 – 29, 2019
World Premiere
Back by popular demand with a revamp for a new year! This festive and raucous musical puts traditional holiday plays on notice! When circumstances beyond their control strand six strangers together at Benny’s Tavern in the French Quarter just two days before Christmas, they’re forced to find new ways to celebrate the season. Don’t miss Leslie Castay and Ian Hoch irreverent evening of song, comedy, and holiday cocktails, featuring an all-star cast of your favorite New Orleans entertainers.
By Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Ntozake Shange
Directed by Chivas Michael
Presented by the Southern Rep Theatre Acting Company Members
January 22 – February 2, 2020
Regional Premiere
Poet-Playwright Ntozake Shange (For Colored Girls) adapted Bertolt Brecht’s classic drama in 1980, transposing the action from Europe during the Thirty Years War to the American Southwest after the Civil War. Mother Courage struggles to survive the war by profiting from it, but ends up paying the ultimate cost.
The play, which earned Shange an Obie Award, has never been published or performed since its premiere in 1980. Now pulled from the archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library for this production, Shange’s adaptation puts a uniquely American spin on Brecht’s classic drama that forces us to ask how, in the darkest of times, do we survive with our humanity intact?
By Steve Yockey
Directed by Aimée Hayes
March 18 – April 5, 2020
In Partnership with the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, a project of the Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival
NNPN (National New Play Network) Rolling World Premiere
REYKJAVIK is a series of interconnected vignettes featuring tourists mixing with the (sometimes supernatural) Icelandic locals. We eavesdrop on the private lives of lovers, hospitality workers, party goers, and even a really handsome bird or two. This play is a glimpse into a magical, dark, and sometimes violent world where everyone hopes to find love and joy beneath the glow of the Northern Lights.
By New Orleans playwright Pamela Davis-Noland
Directed by Helen Jaksch
May 13 – 31, 2020
World Premiere
In playwright Pamela Davis-Noland’s bold new imagining, Bayou Road stretches over 1000 years; her play illuminates the stories of the extraordinary peoples–famous or forgotten, real or imagined–who made their way along the old high ground from the Mississippi River toward Lake Pontchartrain, bringing news, plying wares, and settling into remarkably diverse communities along the ridge. The story of Bayou Road is the story of New Orleans in miniature, where many cultures meet, song and dance are integral to any tale told, and geography is inextricable from history. The play CHEMIN DU BAYOU seeks to capture that story through an interdisciplinary celebration of storytelling, song, and dance, developed out of historical research and present-day oral histories from current and former residents, retailers, and parishioners of St. Rose de Lima. Among others, the road has been home over the years to indigenous peoples, free people of color, Sicilian immigrants, Afro-Caribbean retailers, female business owners of color, and the long-integrated parish and school of St. Rose de Lima itself.
Best prices for a full season of theatre
Reserved seats
Fee-free exchange privileges
THE FRIENDS CIRCLE enhanced membership level: For an add-on membership fee of $35, members of the Friends Circle enjoy 5 free drinks, exclusive swag and program listing
AND NEW FOR THE 2019-20 SEASON IS AN ALL ACCESS PASS!
Access tickets to all Mainstage shows
DEBAUCHERY! season pass
Friends Circle Membership
Unlimited access to Southern Rep-produced Lagniappe programming
Reserved seats to all performances, including Lagniappe
Unlimited free exchanges, including between different plays (a Whole Shebang exclusive!)
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