Steppenwolf Announces 2022-23 Season, With Plays by James Ijames, Rajiv Joseph, and Harold Pinter
(© Michael Brosilow)
Steppenwolf Theatre Company has announced its 2022-23 season, which will feature eight plays (four of them world premieres) at its newly enlarged home, which includes the 50,000-square-foot Liz and Eric Lefkofsky Arts and Education Center.
"The newly expanded Steppenwolf campus was created as a love letter to our city — a space where audiences from across our 77 neighborhoods can share in the work on our stages and engage in conversations about it," said artistic director Audrey Francis. "The 2022-23 season honors that commitment with wide-ranging programming that will activate not only our stages, but the spaces between."
World premieres include Vichet Chum's Bald Sisters, a story of sisters reconciling their family's Cambodian heritage with its complicated American present. Patricia McGregor directs the production, which will run December 1-January 15, 2023. Ensemble member Kate Arrington makes her playwriting debut with Another Marriage, an intimate portrait of marriage that upends the typical romantic comedy. Terry Kinney directs (June 15, 2023-July 23, 2023). Steppenwolf for Young Adults (SYA) will present 1919, adapted by J. Nicole Brooks from Eve L. Ewing's collection of poems about the killing of Black teenager Eugene Williams off the segregated 1919 Chicago lakeshore. Gabrielle Randle-Bent and Tasia A. Jones direct (October 4-29). SYA will present another world premiere, Chlorine Sky, directed by Ericka Ratcliff and adapted by Mahogany L. Browne from her popular young adult novel of the same title (February 14, 2023-Mach 11, 2023).
Steppenwolf will host three Chicago premieres: James Ijames's fantastical play The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington will be directed by Whitney White and feature ensemble member Celeste M. Cooper (September 1-October 9). Ensemble member Rajiv Joseph's Describe the Night is a sweeping epic spanning a century of Russian history and myth, which will be presented March 2, 2023-April 9, 2023. Donnetta Lavinia Grays's poetic and heartbreaking portrait of Black love, Last Night and the Night Before will be directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton and feature ensemble member Namir Smallwood (April 6, 2023-May 14, 2023).
The season will conclude with a new production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land from director Les Water, featuring ensemble members Jeff Perry and Austin Pendleton (July 13, 2023-August 20, 2023). Pendleton is currently starring on Broadway in the Steppenwolf production of Tracy Letts's The Minutes.
