New York Theatre Workshop Sets 2008-09 Season Lineup

Directors Jo Bonney, Peter Brook and Ruben Santiago-Hudson will take on works by scribes Michael Weller, Marie-Helene Estienne and Naomi Wallace as part of New York Theatre Workshop's 2008-09 season. The 26th annual lineup will kick off with Weller's Beast, directed by Bonney, beginning August 29 and running through October 12 at the off-Broadway company's off-Broadway theater.

Beast, written by Academy Award nominee Weller Moonchildren, Spoils of War, Loose Ends, the screenplay for Ragtime, is described as a blood-red comic road adventure. The show stars two Iraqi War veterans—badly mutilated but as fiercely patriotic as ever—as they make their way home from a military hospital in Germany. Their marauding adventure across America takes them to Crawford, Texas, where they meet up with their Commander-in-Chief and offer a surefire solution to all his problems.

Next up is The Grand Inquisitor an adaptation of the Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov by French playwright Marie-Helene Estienne, directed by Peter Brook. Based on Dostoyevsky's chilling parable about the perversion of religious faith in life stars longtime Brook collaborator Bruce Myers and is co-presented by Theatre for a New Audience. The limited engagement will run from October 22 through November 23,

The season will close in Spring 2009 with Things of Dry Hours by playwright and poet Naomi Wallace The Fever Chart, One Flea Spare, directed by Tony Award winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson Lackawanna Blues, Seven Guitars, Dry Hours centers on black Sunday school teacher and Communist Party member Tice Hogan, who lives on the edge of trouble. When a white factory worker on the run demands sanctuary, Tice and his daughter risk being pushed over that edge. The show is a follow-up to NYTW's 1999 production of Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, an examination of the conflict between race and ideology.

NYTW will host a special series of events leading up to November's presidential election: the return of Mark Crispin Miller and his observations of the present political landscape; Gore Vidal's Weekend, a play from 1968 which paints a portrait of the Republican Party as it struggles to reinvent itself after Barry Goldwater's catastrophic loss of the 1964 election; and Year One of the Empire, a collage of actual words written and/or spoken around the time of the Spanish-American War, revealing parallels to other American military misadventures like Vietnam and Iraq. Dates will be announced soon.

The season will also feature the debut of NYTW's "Off Again" musical series, an off-Broadway answer to the popular Encores! series, which will present concert versions of notable off-Broadway musicals for limited runs. Exact titles and production dates have not been set, but shows currently under consideration include Maria Irene Fornes and Al Carmine's 1969 tuner Promenade, Peter Link's Iphigenia in Concert, to be directed by Passing Strange's Annie Dorsen, and The Waves, a musical based on Virginia Woolf's experimental novel of the same title and created by Lisa Peterson and David Bucknam.