Zeitgeist Stage Company’s 2009 – 2010 Season

Lady by Craig Wright

October 30 through November 21, 2009

Lady is Craig Wright's enormously moving drama about three friends on a hunting trip which weighs in wisely on the nature of change, distance and truth. The characters include a pro-Bush, pro-Cheney, pro-war politician and a loving dog that just wants to be a good girl. One of them won't survive the day. Lady was nominated as a 2008-2009 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Play.

Graham, a hawkish conservative Democrat, is in town from Washington, where his friends long ago helped to send him, Kenny with some inherited money and Dyson by managing his campaign for Congress. "Those were different times," Dyson says, furious now that Graham has morphed into someone whose principles he abhors, and genuinely frightened for his son, who listened to Graham talk last night at the Elks Club and promptly announced he was joining the Marines. Dyson begs, pleads, demands and threatens Graham into talking his son out of his seemingly irrational act, however Graham is unmoved by Dyson’s protestations, resulting in a climatic confrontation.

Playwright Wright says his play is "about unfaithfulness: unfaithfulness to spouses, unfaithfulness to friends, unfaithfulness to patriotic ideals and unfaithfulness to the simple innocence of life's desire to live.'' Wright has been nominated for an Emmy Award, and is the creator of TV’s Dirty Sexy Money, having also written for Six Feet Under, Lost and Brothers & Sisters. His theater credits include The Pavilion, Recent Tragic Events, Orange Flower Water, Grace and numerous others. The Pavilion, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the American Theatre Critics' Association Best New Play Award, and a 2005-2006 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.

"As he does in all his work, Wright writes crackling dialogue peppered with meaningful pauses and likely to take unsettling turns. And while his stories take on major issues, he has us view them through a darkly comic and very personal lens. In Lady the big issue is the Iraq War and that spaniel [Lady of the title] is a symbol of how war puts those still full of puppy energy in harm's way." – CurtainUp.com

Private Fears in Public Places by Alan Ayckbourn

February 12 through March 6, 2010

Six people, six separate lives – yet all strangely intertwined by both circumstance and chance. Does Nicola still love Dan? Will Dan get out of the pub and get a proper job? Will Ambrose, his favorite bartender, put his bedridden father into an old age home? Can Stewart be on the verge of an office romance? Will his sister, Imogen, ever find true love through personal ads she constantly uses to secure blind dates? What on earth is Charlotte - Stewart’s secretary - up to in her second job as Ambrose’s father’s caretaker? And what on earth is on those videotapes Charlotte keeps lending both Stewart and Ambrose? Told in a brisk, cinematic style, these personal stories of the misheard, the unspoken, and the sadly misunderstood are brilliantly portrayed into a mosaic of contemporary society.

Alan Ayckbourn is one of the most prolific and widely performed of English language playwrights, and a highly regarded British theatre director. He has written 73 full length plays, many of which have been performed in London and New York. Among his best known titles are Taking Steps, Bedroom Farce, A Small Family Business, Woman in Mind, A Chorus of Disapproval, Communicating Doors, Absent Friends, The Norman Conquests, and How The Other Half Loves.

"A minor-key comedy about six Londoners leading lives of quiet desperation, it is rueful, funny, touching and altogether wonderful." – The New York Times

"This magnificently realized bittersweet contemporary comedy … fascinatingly reveals more and more layers of each small life, scene by scene. As come the revelations, so do the laughs." – CurtainUp.com

To Be Announced

April 30 through May 22, 2010

Zeitgeist Stage is currently in negotiations for the rights for a number of shows for our final slot o next season. Each which would be New England premieres of contemporary works by some of our most interesting and up-and-coming playwrights. We hope to announce the final selection for our exciting 2009-2010 season within the next several weeks. Stay tuned to this site for announcements once the final show has been scheduled.