Shattered Globe Theatre Announces 25th Season:
MARVIN’S ROOM
By Scott McPherson
Directed by Producing Artistic Director Sandy Shinner
ANIMALS OUT OF PAPER
By Rajiv Joseph
Directed by Devon de Mayo
John Ball’s
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT
Adapted by Matt Pelfrey
Directed by Louis Contey
CHICAGO (August 6, 2015) – Shattered Globe Theatre is pleased to announce its 25th season, kicking off this fall with a 25th anniversary production of MARVIN’S ROOM, Chicago playwright Scott McPherson’s award-winning dark and mordantly funny comedy about putting family first, directed by Producing Artistic Director Sandy Shinner. This winter, SGT presents Pulitzer Prize-winner Rajiv Joseph’s uncommon love story ANIMALS OUT OF PAPER, a vibrant and nuanced peek into the creative process that shapes three lives, directed by Devon de Mayo. The season concludes next spring with John Ball’s gripping, racially charged mystery IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, adapted by Matt Pelfrey and directed by Louis Contey. The full 2015-16 Season will be presented at Shattered Globe’s resident home, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave. in Chicago. Tickets will go on sale at a future date at www.shatteredglobe.org, by calling (773) 975-8150 or in person at the Theater Wit Box Office.
Shattered Globe is also pleased to announce partial casting for MARVIN’S ROOM, which will feature Ensemble Members Rebecca Jordan and Linda Reiter and SGT Protégé Program graduate Nate Santana with Deanna Dunagan, Kyle Klein II, Deanna Reed-Foster and Don Tieri. Additional casting will be announced.
“I am particularly excited to open the Shattered Globe’s 25th anniversary season with Scott McPherson’s play Marvin’s Room, also celebrating its 25th anniversary,” comments Producing Artistic Director Sandy Shinner. “Marvin’s Room’s generous spirit and its reminder of the rewards of caring for others seems like healing balm when the theater community is still reeling from recent profound losses. As the original dramaturg on the play, and a friend of Scott’s, I had always hoped to spend a little more time in his witty, loving world. But there is also another side to Marvin’s Room; and all three plays in the season reveal people coming together while falling apart. In Marvin’s Room and Animals Out of Paper, the characters struggle with the difficulties of intimacy, friendship and loneliness – one kind of ‘segregation.’ The racially motivated police brutality of In the Heat of the Night explores these same themes at the level of race. I am also thrilled that Lou Contey, a former SGT artistic director, is part of our anniversary season, and happy to welcome Devon de Mayo who is directing her first SGT show,” adds Shinner.
Shattered Globe Theatre’s 25th Season includes:
October 1 – November 14, 2015
MARVIN’S ROOM
By Scott McPherson
Directed by Producing Artistic Director Sandy Shinner
Winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Drama Desk Award for New Play, MARVIN’S ROOM has been rapturously praised by audiences and critics alike since its world premiere at Chicago’s Goodman Theater in 1990. Bessie devotes her life to caring for her elderly father and aunt and so her own diagnosis of leukemia plummets their world into a tailspin. In need of a bone marrow transplant, Bessie reaches out to her estranged sister Lee and her two nephews. If they are to be of any help, then old wounds must be opened. MARVIN’S ROOM is about finding family and the timeless concerns of living, dying and caring for others told with McPherson’s signature humor.
During the play’s Chicago debut, the Chicago Tribune’s Richard Christiansen wrote, “From the everyday environment of a suburban home to the fantasy land of Disney World, McPherson found the exact scene, the perfect dialogue and the precise image to express his American tragicomedy.” The Chicago Sun-Times’ Hedy Weiss said “it is McPherson’s great and original gift to make his characters and their fates seem almost shamefully comical and absolutely honest at every moment” and The New York Times called the play “one of the funniest plays of the year as well as one of the wisest and most moving.” The Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones wrote during a later production in 2009, “time has withered neither its power nor its wisdom.”
January 14 – February 27, 2016
ANIMALS OUT OF PAPER
By Rajiv Joseph
Directed by Devon de Mayo
In Rajiv Joseph’s ANIMALS OUT OF PAPER, Andy, a calculus teacher and avid fan, pressures a reclusive Ilana, a world famous origami artist, into becoming an unwitting mentor to a troubled teenage prodigy, Suresh. These three intriguingly flawed characters begin to reshape and mold each other’s lives in much the same way they fold and crease their origami art. During a production at New York’s Second Stage Theater, The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Joseph’s observant, pitch-perfect script seems modest at first but is really quite ambitious, dealing ruthlessly…with the fragility of happiness, the tragedy of impulsiveness and the tenuousness of hope.”
April 21 – June 4, 2016
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT
Based on the novel by John Ball
Adapted by Matt Pelfrey, directed by Louis Contey
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT recounts the classic, highly charged story of an African American police officer asked to investigate a murder in a racially hostile southern town. It’s a torrid night in 1965 Argo, Alabama when a dead white man is found. The local police, desperately searching for a motive and a suspect, arrest a black man passing through town. The police soon discover that their suspect is an expert homicide detective from LA and they must confront their personal prejudices as they are forced to work side by side to solve the crime. The award winning film version starring Sidney Poitier remains emblematic of our country in the 1960s. Fifty years later, Pelfry’s new adaptation of the novel leaves room for the evolution of these attitudes. But watching the nightly news – how far have we come?
About the Directors:
Sandy Shinner joined Shattered Globe Theatre in October 2013 as the theater’s first Producing Artistic Director. She directed Sally Nemeth’s Mill Fire at SGT in 2014. The former Associate Artistic Director of Victory Gardens Theater, she created the nationally known IGNITION! Festival, served as co-director of the Access Project, and accepted the 2001 Regional Theater Tony Award on behalf of VG with former Artistic Director Dennis Zacek and former Managing Director Marcelle McVay. Her other recent directing credits include: the world premiere of Rasheeda Speaking by Joel Drake Johnson (Rivendell Theater Ensemble) and Creditors by August Strindberg (Remy Bumppo Theater Company). She has directed over 80 plays at theaters including Victory Gardens, Remy Bumppo, American Blues, the University of Virginia, Actors Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival, Steppenwolf’s First Look Repertory of New Work, New York’s 78th Street Theater Lab and the Sacramento Theater Company, among others. Her production of Trying by Joanna McClelland Glass transferred to New York and her direction was nominated for the Joe A. Callaway Award. Shinner received the 2013 Kathryn V. Lamkey Spirit Award from the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee of Actors’ Equity Association for her commitment to diversity and non-traditional casting. She has been recognized as one of “50 Top Players” by Newcity and a “Chicagoan of the Year” by the Chicago Tribune. She is an adjunct professor at DePaul’s Theatre School, an At Large Ambassador for the National New Play Network, and an Artistic Affiliate at American Blues Theater.
Devon de Mayomost recently served as the Resident Director under Stephen Daldry on the Broadway production of The Audience. Directing credits include Jet Black Chevrolet (side project); Lost in Yonkers (Norhtlight Theatre); Compulsion and Everything is Illuminated (Next Theatre); An Actor Prepares (Logan Center); Roadkill Confidential, The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler and Clouds (Dog & Pony); Infiltrating Bounce (Luminaria, San Antonio); and 52 (Canal Café, London). Directing & Devising credits include Guerra: A Clown Play (performances in Chicago, New York, Albuquerque, Madrid, Bogota, and Mexico City); The Whole World is Watching and As Told by the Vivian Girls (Dog & Pony) and The Twins Would Like to Say (Dog & Pony, Steppenwolf Garage Rep). She is the co-artistic director of Dog & Pony Theatre Co and received her MFA in Directing from Middlesex University in London.
Louis Contey returns to Shattered Globe where he has directed The Whaleship Essex, A View from the Bridge, The Manchurian Candidate, A Streetcar Named Desire, All My Sons, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Judgement at Nuremberg and Requiem for a Heavyweight, among others. He has directed over 70 plays, among them The Master & Margarita, Marriage Play, The Diviners, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and Hamlet. He is an Associate Artist at TimeLine Theatre where he is currently directing The Price, and has directed The Apple Family Plays as well as Frost/Nixon, Awake and Sing!, The General from America, Lillian, Copenhagen, It’s All True, and Pravda. He has also worked at The Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Strawdog Theatre, Theatre at the Center, Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, Provision Theatre, Eclipse Theatre and American Theater Company. He is a twelve-time Jeff Award nominee and has received seven Jeff Citations, as well as an After Dark Award. He teaches acting and directing part-time at The Theatre School at DePaul University.
Shattered Globe Theatre (Sandy Shinner, Producing Artistic Director; Doug McDade, Managing Director) was born in a storefront space on Halsted Street in l991. Since then, SGT has produced more than 60 plays, including nine American and world premieres, and garnered an impressive 42 Jeff Awards and 97 Jeff Award nominations, as well as the acclaim of critics and audiences alike. Shattered Globe is an ensemble driven theater whose mission is to create an intimate, visceral theater experience that challenges the perspective of audience and artist alike through passionate storytelling. Shattered Globe is inspired by the diversity of our city and committed to making the theater available to all audiences. Through initiatives such as the Protégé Program, Shattered Globe creates a space which allows emerging artists to grow and share in the ensemble experience.
Shattered Globe Theatre is partially supported and funded by generous grants from The Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, The MacArthur Fund for Arts & Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, The Illinois Arts Council, The Field Foundation of Illinois, The James P. and Brenda S. Grusecki Family Foundation, The Blum-Kovler Family Foundation, The Robert J. & Loretta W. Cooney Family Foundation, the Shulman-Rochambeau Charitable Foundation, and Arts Work Fund.
