The Goodman Theatre announced production plans Thursday morning for its 2018–2019 season. The slate includes the Chicago premiere of the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Sweat, artistic director Robert Falls conjuring Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, and Mary Zimmerman putting her spin on The Music Man, as well as world-premiere plays by Ike Holter, Rebecca Gilman, Christina Anderson, David Cale and Dael Orlandersmith. The five premieres were all developed in part through the Goodman’s New Stages workshop series.
Cale, a British-born, New York–based monologuist who first performed at the Goodman in 1988, returns to open the season in the Goodman’s mainstage Albert Theatre with We’re Only Alive for A Short Amount of Time (Sept 15–Oct 21), a solo piece with music about his parents and his unhappy childhood in England. It was presented as a work in progress in New Stages 2017 and earlier this year at New York’s Public Theater.
Following the annual staging of A Christmas Carol (Nov 17–Dec 30, with Larry Yando in his 11th outing as Scrooge), next in the Albert is How to Catch Creation (Jan 19–Feb 24), a new work by Anderson (Man in Love, BlackTop Sky) about artists and intellectuals, creativity and legacy; Niegel Smith directs.
Sweat (Mar 9–Apr 14), the second Pulitzer winner for playwright Lynn Nottage (Ruined), comes to the Goodman after a 2017 Broadway bow. Ron OJ Parson will direct the portrait of factory workers whose Rust Belt livelihood is slipping away from them.
Falls will take on The Winter’s Tale (May 4–June 9), Shakespeare’s vexing late-career comedy about jealousy, revenge and resurrection among royals. The Albert season is capped off next summer with Zimmerman’s new production of The Music Man (June 29–Aug 4), Meredith Willson’s con-man comedy about trouble right here in River City.
The three remaining premieres will be staged in the smaller Owen Theatre, starting with Orlandersmith’s rescheduled Lady in Denmark (Oct 19–Nov 18), directed by Chay Yew. The new piece about a widow finding comfort in Billie Holiday’s music was originally scheduled for the 2016–17 season but bumped in favor of Pamplona, which then itself had to be postponed due to Stacy Keach’s illness.
Gilman’s Twilight Bowl (Feb 8–Mar 10), about four female friends facing divergent paths after graduating from high school, will be directed by Erica Weiss. Lili-Anne Brown will stage Holter’s Lottery Day (Mar 29–Apr 28), as previously reported by the Chicago Tribune in a profile of the playwright. It’s the concluding piece in Holter’s cycle of seven interconnected plays set in present-day Chicago.
Still to be announced is a co-production with a Mexican theater company in partnership with the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance—presumably as part of the second Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, which is set to announce its schedule next week. And also on tap in the Owen: New Stages 2018, presenting six new developmental works from September 19 to October 7, and a new companion production for A Christmas Carol: David Sedaris’s decidedly not new The Santaland Diaries, to be directed by Steve Scott for a December run (exact dates TBA).