Season Announcements from MTC, Donmar, and Public

Serious theatergoers on both sides of the ocean, take note: The Public Theater, Manhattan Theater Club, and Donmar Warehouse have all announced their 2002-2003 seasons. Just for starters, the Public is teaming up with the producers at the Donmar to present the American premiere of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out, about an all-star baseball player with a scandalous secret (beginning September 5). David Mamet’s Boston Marriage, a drawing-room comedy of manners set in late 19th-century America, pops into the Public in November. Late pop art icon Keith Haring will have a musical tribute move in early next year. And Suzan-Lori Parks, fresh from her Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, returns with Fucking A — a tale of love, abortion and revenge.

Manhattan Theater Club blends new work with New York premieres. Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman, which follows a dark-skinned African American woman’s friendship with a light-skinned man, kicks off the season on October 22. The NYC debut of out-of-town playwright John Corwin occurs on December 17 with the opening of Gone Home. Manhattan celebrity David Ives tries out his new Polish Joke on February 25. And did you hear the one about the Cambridge astro-physicist who returns home for his bee-keeping father’s funeral? That’s a London import called Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones that hits MTC on May 15. The Club rounds off its season with Marsha Norman’s Last Dance, about an American poet in Southern France.

On the other side of the pond, London’s Donmar Warehouse dusts off some old classics, starting with Noël Coward’s little-produced The Vortex on December 5. The company turns to Nobel Prize-winning clown Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist in late February and then will deal with existential anxiety in Albert Camus’ Caligula at the end of April, but will come out singing Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures in June.