As live, in-person arts organizations continue to navigate the ebbs and flows of welcoming consumers into their spaces, the Marin Theatre Company is putting a stake in the ground for its 2022-23 season.
In doing so, it’s leaning on some wildly successful talents, a mix of classics and innovative new material and a collaboration with Tam High School’s Conservatory Theatre Ensemble. It’s also paring back its traditional six-play format to four, perhaps leaning into its vaunted reputation for bold performances and subject matter for audiences more prepared to engage with live theatre than they may have been in recent pandemic-laden years.
The season kicks off with Dunsinane (Sept. 22-Oct. 16), a sequel to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” written by Scottish playwright David Greig and directed by MTC Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis. From Nov. 25-Dec. 18, MTC returns to its “yearslong exploration of the oeuvre of award-winning African American playwright August Wilson with Two Trains Running,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Once again set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, this play explores the neighborhood’s fate through the lens of a diner slated for demolition.
For the third play of the season, the theater company returns to stalwart MTC playwright-in-residence Lauren Gunderson, whose MTC works spans the multi-play Christmas at Pemberley series and the widely hailed The Catastrophist, her solo play based on a Wired magazine piece of the fascinating tale of Nathan Wolfe, Gunderson’s husband. This time around, it’s Justice (Feb. 16-March 12), a musical about Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, with music by Bree Lowdermilk and lyrics by Kait Kerrigan. It came to be when Sean Daniels, the Arizona Theatre Company’s artistic director, reached out to Gunderson about creating a play about Justice O’Connor. Gunderson ultimately came up with a production about her and the woman who became one of her trusted colleagues, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and turned it into a musical, according to the Chronicle.
The third play of the season is the West Coast premiere of Where Did We Sit on the Bus? (May 4-28), Brian Quijada’s one-person musical play investigating where Latinos fit in an American racial history narrative that too often poses a false dichotomy of Black or white. Satya Chávez, who wrote some of the show’s compositions, stars, and Matt Dickson directs, the Chronicle reported
To cap off the season, MTC is launching the two-week Marin New Play Festival, in which professional theater artists workshop a quartet of new plays with Tam High students, each getting a staged reading.
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