WSC Avant Bard

Shadow Puppet Dream Highlights Season

WSC Avant Bard begins Season 26—its second quarter century of making theater on the edge—with a lineup that features an eclectic fusion of East and West, classic and contemporary, feminism and farce, and a new take on an old Shakespeare fave.

Director Randy Baker, renowned for his visually stunning work with Rorschach Theatre, will reimagine William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream using Indonesian-inspired shadow puppets accompanied by an actor-generated percussion orchestra. This production is scheduled for the New Year right in the middle of the season.

The season opens in September with Friendship Betrayed, a 17th-century comic gem by Spanish playwright María de Zayas y Sotomayor, a forerunner of modern feminism. This rarely produced masterpiece is about what happens to women's friendships in their pursuit of men. Director Kari Ginsburg will set the play in the Roaring Twenties, a time when women had just won the vote and were testing the limits of their newfound sexual freedom. Avant Bard will present Friendship Betrayed concurrently with the Women's Voices Theatre Festival as a blast from the past by a playwright who was way ahead of her time.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Avant Bard's gift to Metro D.C. theatregoers will be a play about a great American artist's coming of age: Holiday Memories, based on short stories by Truman Capote and adapted for the stage by Russell Vandenbroucke. This reminiscence shows Capote as a boy abandoned by his family in Depression-era Alabama. Called Buddy in the play, he talks with the writer self he became, and we meet the kindly soul, Miss Sook, who saw and forged a connection between the two.

Summertime will be a time of fun and foolishness when Avant Bard presents The Good Devil (in Spite of Himself), a world premiere in the style of commedia dell'arte. Playwrights Mario Baldessari and Tyler Herman take a flying leap off historical fact and deliver a riotous farce about art and censorship.

The company is offering a four-show Passport ticket package of $99 that can be redeemed for four seats, singly or together, at any future mainstage Avant Bard production through the end of the season. For more information about the perks and benefits of a Passport and the easy booking options it offers, visit http://avantbard.ticketleap.com/2015-2016-passport/.

August 6, 2015

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