Press release
(STILLWATER, Okla., Aug. 13, 2018) – Changes are afoot for the OSU Department of Theatre’s newly announced main stage season for the coming school year, and season tickets are now on sale.
Head of Theatre Andrew Kimbrough said a few faculty retirements have opened the door for new personnel to join the production team.
“We’ve got a new scenic designer and costume designer joining us, as well as two new directors, so I think our longtime patrons should expect to see some fresh looks and a new aesthetic on our stages,” he said. “Our annual musical promises to be a little bigger than what we’re used to.”
Main stage productions are typically performed in the large Vivia Locke Theatre in the Seretean Center for the Performing Arts, but this year the intimate Jerry Davis Studio Theatre in Gundersen Hall will be home to not one but two main stage shows.
“We have not done this in a while,” Kimbrough said. “But our patrons have been asking for a smaller, ‘black box’ kind of experience, which is what the Davis Theatre provides.”
OSU Theatre’s 2018-2019 season lineup is The Three Musketeers; Doubt: A Parable; True West and Oklahoma!
The Alexander Dumas classic The Three Musketeers, adapted for the stage by American playwright Ken Ludwig, leads off the season in October. Set in 17th-century France, the story follows the adventures of the young and naïve D’Artegnan, a talented yet brash swordsman who wishes to join the ranks of the king’s own Musketeers of the Guard. He must find acceptance by the three title characters while escaping the deadly machinations of the villainous Rochefort. Ludwig’s new, accessible version has plenty of swordplay and physical action while delivering plenty of comedy. Helmed by professor of performance Lloyd Caldwell, who specializes in teaching and choreographing stage violence, The Three Musketeers requires actors well-versed in stage combat. All of the actors involved in the fight sequences will be taking an additional class with Caldwell in Stage Combat during the fall semester. The Three Musketeers plays in the Vivia Locke Theatre Oct. 11-14.
The second show of the season is John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, a Parable, directed by guest artist Tom Alsip, who is a visiting assistant professor of performance for the next year. Doubt premiered in New York in 2004 and went on to win the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for best play in 2005. The play was mounted in theaters and universities across the country over the next few years and was made into an Academy Award-nominated movie in 2008, starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. With a cast of four and set in a Catholic school in the Bronx, Doubt tells of the conflict Sister Aloysius and Sister James experience when suspicion is cast on the new rector, Father Flynn, regarding what seems to be an inappropriate relationship that develops between him and a student. The play mounts with steady pressure to an explosive finish, and the intensity of the piece lends itself to a production in the intimate Davis Theatre, running Nov. 1-3 and 8-10. Doubt is produced with generous funding from the Mary Lou Lemon Endowed Professorship for Underrepresented Voices. The play is suitable for mature audiences and late teens.
Sam Shepard may be one of the most recognizable playwrights on the American landscape since the early 1960s. His Pulitzer-prize winning play from 1978, Buried Child, brought him to the attention of a much wider playgoing public, and his appearances in the movies Days of Heaven (1978) and The Right Stuff (1983) made him recognizable to cinephiles. Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre production of his play True West was filmed and broadcast on PBS in 1983. Author of well over 40 plays and films, a screen actor, and recipient of numerous awards, Sam Shepard may rightly be thought of as a late 20th-century American icon. Shepard died in 2017, and this season the department pays its respects with a revival of True West.
Set in the hills east of Los Angeles, True West opens when two estranged brothers, Austin, a rising screenwriter with a family and a mortgage, and Lee, his drifter brother with a criminal past, reunite in their mother’s kitchen. A possible deal for a Hollywood movie prompts a life-threatening battle of wits in Shepard’s exposé of the American Dream and American values. True West is directed by guest artist Carly Conklin and produced in the Jerry Davis Studio over Feb. 14-16 and 21-23. Conklin is a visiting assistant professor of history and drama.
The season finishes with the perennial favorite, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Based on the novel Green Grows the Lilacs by Oklahoma playwright Lynn Riggs, Oklahoma! is set in the days before statehood and tells the stories of a colorful cross-section of ranch hands, farmers and settlers. The central problem revolves around the protagonist Laurey and her struggle over which man she’ll marry, Curly or Jud. Written by the famed duo Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein in 1943, Oklahoma! claims the distinction of being the first successful “book musical” that integrates music and dance to drive the story forward. Without doubt, it has become an American treasure, and the department is proud to present it as the second Paul and Toni Mass Melton endowed musical theatre production at OSU, running April 25-28 in the Vivia Locke Theatre.
The production team for the season consists of production manager Lee Brasuell, scenic designer Eric Barker and costume designer Renee Garcia. Joining the team for Oklahoma! is the Greenwood School of Music’s Dr. Joseph Missal conducting OSU’s Wind Ensemble. Show, season, and price information may be found online at theatre.okstate.edu. Season tickets guarantee patrons a discount on all four shows and are available through the first production.
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