New Plays From Annie Baker, Amy Herzog & More Complete 2012-2013 Playwrights Horizons Season

Plays from Annie Baker, Amy Herzog and more are among the final four productions of Playwrights Horizons 2012-2013 season, joining previously announced shows Detroit and Far From Heaven. Dates and casting for the complete season for the off-Broadway company's productions will be announced in the coming months.

The Mainstage Season will begin with the New York premiere of Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit, which will be mounted in August 2012 by Anne Kauffman. Detroit follows a suburban couple who welcome their new neighbors over for an afternoon barbecue and examines the new friendship as they quickly spin out of control.

The world premiere of Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale will follow, directed by Davis McCallum and presented at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater. In The Whale a six-hundred pound recluse hides away in his apartment eating himself to death on the outskirts of Mormon Country, Idaho. Desperate to reconnect with his long-estranged daughter, he reaches out to her, only to find a viciously sharp-tongued and wildly unhappy teen.

Also on tap for the Mainstage is the world premiere of Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan, directed by Carolyn Cantor. The Great God Pan follows Jaime, whose life in Brooklyn seems just fine: a beautiful girlfriend, a budding journalism career, and parents who live just far enough away. But when a possible childhood trauma comes to light, lives are thrown into a tailspin.

Next up is the premiere of Annie Baker’s The Flick directed by Sam Gold. In a run-down movie theater in central Massachusetts, three underpaid employees mop the floors and attend to one of the last 35 millimeter film projectors in New England. Their tiny battles, and not-so-tiny heartbreaks, play out in the empty aisles, becoming more gripping than the lackluster, second-run movies on screen in The Flick.

Then the world premiere of Tanya Barfield’s The Call, directed by Leigh Silverman, will play the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. The show follows Annie and Peter, who decide to adopt and set their sights on a child from Africa. When the reality of this choice sinks in, the decision opens a well of uncertainty that speaks to their very identity as white Americans.

Ending the season is the musical adaptation of the 2002 film Far From Heaven, featuring a book by Richard Greenberg, music by Tony Award nominee Scott Frankel, lyrics by Tony Michael Korie and direction by Michael Greif. In Far From Heaven, Cathy Whitaker seems to be the picture-perfect wife and mother in 1957 suburban Connecticut. Roiling beneath the surface, however, secret longings and forbidden desires cause her world to unravel––with incendiary consequences.