PlayMakers' new season includes first musical in a decade

For its 35th anniversary season, PlayMakers Repertory Company has laid out an artistically ambitious challenge, including its first musical in more than a decade.

“The season serves as a new point of programming,” said Jeffrey Meanza, the company’s director of education and outreach. “It took all 35 years to get to this level.”

The company’s scheduled five mainstage and three second-stage productions flaunt a wide array of theatrical genres, technical skill sets and sensitive subject matters.

PlayMakers’ offerings are divided between its elaborate mainstage productions, including “As You Like It,” “Fences” and “Angels in America” and more conversational second-stage productions as part of its PRC2 series.

Featured in the smaller Kenan Theatre, “Happy Days,” “Exit Cuckoo (nanny in motherland)” and “The Year of Magical Thinking” seek to directly engage the audience in a specific theme.

“The choosing of plays is a difficult and exciting collaborative process,” managing director Hannah Grannemann said. “First and foremost is our audience. And a musical is what our audience has most requested.”

The highly anticipated “Big River” is an adaptation of Mark Twain’s literary classic “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Producing artistic director Joseph Haj “thinks musicals are an important part of the American canon,” Meanza said. “It is time to break into that world.”

Combined with William Shakespeare’s comedy “As You Like It” and the fantastical “Shipwrecked! An Entertainment,” the float down the Mississippi will bring lighthearted fun to an otherwise dark season.

Though lighter, these works still present staging challenges.

“‘Shipwreck’ uses huge theatrical language,” said Meanza. The work will use large shadow puppets and ends with the lead character riding a giant turtle offstage ­— a turtle the technical staff is still designing, Meanza said.

But this season at the Paul Green Theatre also has edge.

“Fences,” the first-ever PlayMakers’ production of an August Wilson script, explores bigotry and destitution.

At the heart of this year’s lineup is “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning social commentary on AIDS and homosexuality.

“‘Angels in America’ is one of, if not the most important play of the last fifty years,” Meanza said.

A 1996 performance of Kushner’s two-part epic in Charlotte created controversy, as locals protested the work’s themes. PlayMakers members say they are optimistic about its reception in Chapel Hill.

“I think society thinks about it differently than it did at that time,” Granneman said.

Despite its five-act length, the success of last season’s seven-hour epic, “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,” gives the company hope for a full house.

“Happy Days,” starring company regulars and University professors Julie Fishell and Ray Dooley, kicks off the season on Sept. 8.
“Working at PRC is working with the great practitioners of theater in the country,” Dooley said.

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