The Public Theater’s 2022-23 season will function a combination of works rooted in historical past and new items that talk to present cultural shifts — towards racial justice, fairness and incapacity rights. The season kicks off with a manufacturing of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” a couple of Black household’s bid to maneuver right into a home in a white neighborhood of Chicago, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”). Performances are scheduled to start Sept. 27.
This just isn’t O’Hara’s first interpretation of the traditional: He additionally directed a model in 2019, starring S. Epatha Merkerson, at the Williamstown Theater Festival. (The Public Theater mentioned this will likely be a brand new manufacturing, not a remounting of the Williamstown staging.) He can be a playwright (“Barbecue,” “Bootycandy”), and in 2010 he wrote his personal sequel to Hansberry’s play, “The Etiquette of Vigilance.”
The season will even embody the New York premiere of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” — conceived by Greig Sargeant, and developed it as member of Elevator Repair Service, and directed by John Collins — beginning Sept. 24. The play re-enacts a 1965 debate between the author and civil rights advocate James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and an architect of the Twentieth-century conservative motion, for which they had been requested if “the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The present had its premiere final fall at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
Oskar Eustis, the creative director of the Public, mentioned he desires to assist put Hansberry and Baldwin “back at the center of our dramatic tradition.” Baldwin, a towering literary determine, discovered much less success as a dramatist, partly as a result of of the principally white cultural gatekeepers of the ’60s and ’70s. Hansberry turned the first Black girl to be produced on Broadway when “A Raisin in the Sun,” premiered there in 1959, however died only a few years later in 1965.
“It’s absolutely vital for our understanding of this current moment, particularly in terms of relationships between Black and white America,” Eustis mentioned in an interview. “It’s also saying, ‘Hey, Shakespeare isn’t the only classic voice that matters.’”
The upcoming slate of reveals balances classes from the previous with insights into the future of theater. The New York premiere of “Where We Belong,” by Madeline Sayet, a member of the Mohegan tribe, grapples with the legacy of Shakespeare and colonization. Mei Ann Teo will direct the present, which is being produced with Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in affiliation with the Folger Shakespeare Library. Performances are set to start Oct. 28.
For Eustis, Sayet’s solo piece suits effectively into the present cultural motion. “It’s a wave that has picked us up and thrown us forward, and said, ‘It is time to really deal with the legacy of slavery,’” Eustis mentioned. “‘It is time to really turn and fundamentally alter race relations in this country.’”
Artists who’ve beforehand had works staged at the Public — like Suzan-Lori Parks, the theater’s author in residence; James Ijames; and Erika Dickerson-Despenza — will return this season with new performs.
Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” which will likely be staged in November, started as a set of performs that the playwright wrote every day from March 2020 to April 2021. It will likely be adopted by “The Harder They Come,” that includes Jimmy Cliff’s songs and a e book by Parks, in the winter of 2023. The work is a brand new musical adaptation of the 1972 Perry Henzell movie, a couple of younger singer (performed by Cliff) in Jamaica wanting to develop into a star solely to develop into an outlaw after being pushed to determined circumstances. Tony Taccone will direct, with codirection by Sergio Trujillo, and choreography is by Edgar Godineaux.
“That longevity of a relationship with a major artist is hugely important, not only to Suzan-Lori, but to making a statement to the field that it’s possible to spend a life in the theater,” Eustis mentioned. “You can actually keep your feet in the theater and ground your whole career.”
“Good Bones,” written by Ijames (who gained the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Fat Ham,” which is at the moment onstage at the Public in its New York premiere), may have its world premiere in the spring of 2023. The play, directed by Saheem Ali, explores gentrification and the rising value of the American dream. “Shadow/Land,” by Dickerson-Despenza (who gained the Blackburn Prize for her play “Cullud Wattah”) and directed by Candis C. Jones, is the first installment of a 10-play cycle about the Hurricane Katrina diaspora. The Public produced it as an audio play throughout the pandemic. Performances additionally start in spring 2023.
Ryan J. Haddad will make his Off Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories,” about strangers he encounters whereas navigating a metropolis not constructed for cerebral palsy, in the winter of 2023. Jordan Fein is directing the play, produced by the Bushwick Starr and introduced by the Public. It probes discrimination in favor of able-bodied folks.
