SpeakEasy Stage Company Announces 2017-18 Season

SpeakEasy Stage Company has announced its 2017-18 season lineup of Boston premieres.

Jaclyn Backhaus' Men on Boats will open the season, running September 8-October 7. Directed by Dawn M. Simmons, this adventure tale is brought to life by a gender-bending cast of diverse performers who use carefully exaggerated theatrics to tell the story of an actual 1869 expedition to chart the Colorado River.

The Tony Award winning play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (October 20-November 18) will be directed by Paul Daigneault. Based on the best-selling novel, the play takes audiences inside the mind of Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old math savant who talks in loud declamatory sentences, doesn’t do "chat," and can’t stand to be touched.

The New England premiere of Shakespeare in Love will follow (January 12-February 10). Based on the Academy Award-winning film, Shakespeare in Love tells the story of young Will Shakespeare, who is suffering a severe case of writer’s block as the deadline fast approaches to deliver his new play, Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate’s Daughter.

Every Brilliant Thing, by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, will be up next, running March 2-31. The work is described as "a tribute to the irrepressible resilience inside all of us and the capacity to find delight in the everyday."

Closing the season (May 4-June 2) will be a new version of Broadway's Allegiance, written by Marc Acito, Jay Kuo, and Lorenzo Thione and directed by Paul Daigneault. Inspired by the true childhood experience of TV and film actor and social media icon George Takei, this musical tells the story of the Kimura family, whose lives are upended when they and 120,000 other Japanese-Americans are forced to leave their homes following the events at Pearl Harbor.