Guthrie Theater’s 50th Anniversary Season to Celebrate Playwright Christopher Hampton

The Guthrie Theater will kick off its 50th anniversary season with a three-play celebration of prolific British playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton in 2012.

A Guthrie commission of Appomattox, a new play based on his original 2007 opera collaboration with composer Philip Glass, will be presented in the fall of 2012 alongside two of Hampton’s other works, the titles of which will be announced at a later date.

Appomattox deals with the final week of the Civil War and the immediate aftermath of the treaty signed in April 1865, while also considering the fact that 100 years later, the root cause of the Civil War, the suppression of one race by another, had still not been satisfactorily addressed and is still, to this day, a more than contentious issue.

Hampton is also currently represented on the Guthrie stage with his adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award-winning comedy God of Carnage, which is playing on the Theater’s McGuire Proscenium Stage through August 7. He is best known for his 1987 Tony-nominated play Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the subsequent screenplay Dangerous Liaisons – for which he won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay – both based on the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

He also won two Tony Awards for his work on the 1995 musical Sunset Boulevard, including Best Book of a Musical (with Don Black), and Best Original Musical Score – sharing lyrics credit with Don Black and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber – and joined Black in writing the lyrics and book for Frank Wildhorn’s Dracula, the Musical based on the Bram Stoker novel. Among his other plays are Total Eclipse, The Philanthropist, and Tales from Hollywood.