Streep, LaChiusa, Groff, Smith, Rivera, Grimm & Son Set for Public's Season

The Public Theater has announced plans for its 2005-2006 season. The company's lineup at its downtown home will include Michael John LaChiusa's See What I Wanna See previously titled R Shomon, Rinne Groff's The Ruby Sunrise and world premieres of José Rivera's School of the Americas, David Grimm's Measure for Pleasure, Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy and Diana Son's Satellites. The season will be capped off by a Central Park staging of Mother Courage and Her Children starring Meryl Streep.

Suggested from short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa as translated by Takashi Kojima, See What I Wanna See explores the many facets of reality, faith and love. The show, directed by Ted Sperling, premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival last summer. Although her participation in the Public Theater mounting has not been confirmed, Audra McDonald starred in the show at Williamstown and has been involved in its development.

The Ruby Sunrise takes place in 1927 in a barn on the outskirts of Indianapolis, where a young woman named Ruby struggles to realize her dream of inventing and perfecting the first all-electrical television system. Twenty-five years later, in a television studio in Manhattan, her daughter faces similar battles of will and crises of faith as she works to get Ruby's story told as she feels it must be told. The Public Theater;s new artistic director Oskar Eustis will direct.

A co-production between LAByrinth Theater Company and the Public Theater, School of the Americas is set in a school house in Bolivia, where Che Guevara, wounded and imprisoned, waits to learn whether the CIA will buy him from the Bolivian government or whether he faces execution. He spends his days comforted by conversations with the local schoolteacher, a woman awakened politically and emotionally by the revolutionary leader.

Measure for Pleasure features gender-switching, mistaken identities, double-dealing, mortal duels, gay marriage and a sex cave. The show, directed by Peter DuBois, will be developed this summer at the Sundance Theater Lab.

Let Me Down Easy centers on what is happening to our physical selves in a society where human interactions are devalued, shortened, and governed by commerce. Who controls the sick body in need of help--the doctor or the patient? Who controls the bodies of people asked by their professions--from soldiers to athletes to health workers themselves--to put their bodies at work? It is the latest work from an author and performer whose previous solo shows for the Public include House Arrest, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 and Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities.

Satellites focuses on Nina and Miles, an interracial couple, who move into the transforming neighborhood of Clinton Hill with their baby. They are all welcomed by a rock through the window. Racial identity, trust, community and the way we live now are all called into question in this new play by the author of Stop Kiss.

Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, which will play in Central Park in the summer of 2006, focuses on a woman who must survive during the nightmare of the Thirty Years War. She depends on the war for her financial success, but it is the same war that is taking her children away. Streep's last New York stage appearance was also at Central Park's Delacorte Theatre. She appeared in a starry production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull in 2001 for the Public.

The Public is currently presenting Neil LaBute's This Is How It Goes at its home on Lafayette Street. This summer it will present As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream at Central Park's Delacorte Theatre.

While they have not even finished the 2004-2005 season, the Public has not only announced its 2005-2006 season, it also already has plans for the season after that. John Guare's Free Man of Color and David Henry Hwang's Yellowface are already on the 2006-2007 Public lineup.