Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Announces a Political 35th-Anniversary Season

Washington, D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company has announced its 35th-anniversary season lineup, featuring works that explore the divide between the haves and the have-nots.

The season will open with a production of David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette, directed by Yury Urnov. "Through David Adjmi's incisive contemporary lens, history's most notorious queen becomes a full-blooded, complex, and tragic heroine who realizes too late that there's an unstoppable revolution brewing outside her window," says Woolly Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz. "This is a Marie Antoinette for today: a potent symbol of all the things that keep us from seeing the real forces bearing down on us: our cult of celebrity, our fatuous politics, and a pace of change we can hardly fathom." Company member Kimberly Gilbert will star as Marie. The production is scheduled to run from September 15-October 12.

Next up will be The Russians Are Coming: A Festival of Radical New Theatre From Moscow. The festival will feature 75 Russian artists who will present four new works representing the cutting edge of Moscow's theater scene. The pieces will include works by famous international directors Dmitry Krymov and Kirill Serebrennikov as well as young artists Svetlana Zemlyakova and Yury Muravitsky. Performances will run from October 25-November 9.

Famous Puppet Death Scenes, created and performed by Old Trout Puppet Workshop, will ring in the New Year, running from December 9-January 4, 2015. Narrated by puppet Nathan Tweak, the unusual holiday show features a collection of 22 scenes of famous puppet deaths. "This is most definitely a puppet show for adults," says Shalwitz, "and the parade of psychologically complex and original puppet characters is enthralling."

Next will be a production of Lisa D'Amour's Cherokee, directed by John Vreeke. The play follows two couples from Houston who take a camping trip to Cherokee, North Carolina. Their lives, however, are upended when Mike mysteriously disappears and is replaced by a young American Indian named Josh. The production is scheduled to run from February 9-March 8, 2015.

Lights Rise on Grace, written by Chad Beckin and directed by Michael John Garcés, will receive its world premiere with a run from March 30-April 26, 2015. In the play, three actors depict a triangle of outsiders whose interwoven love stories examine issues of race, sexuality, and family.

Zombie: The American, another world premiere play written by Robert O'Hara and directed by Howard Shalwitz, will close the season. Set in 2063, Thom Valentine, the first openly gay President of the United States, has just completed a long reelection campaign and faces a number of challenges: an imminent Civil War, the threat of an African invasion, an adulterous First Gentleman, and zombies in the basement of the White House. Valentine must decide which institutions he cares about saving most and at what cost. The production will run from May 25-June 21, 2015.