For Immediate Release: August 11, 2005
Media Contact: Patricia Allen, Temple Theaters, 215.204.1334

Lots of laughter, a Tony Award-winning Sondheim musical, two Philadelphia premieres, a powerful drama based on a prize-winning novel and an intimate staging of a monumental Shakespearean masterpiece highlight the Temple Theaters 2005-2006 season.

"It is exciting to bring the artistry of Temple University's distinguished theater program to the stage," said Douglas C. Wager, recently named artistic director for Temple Theaters. "We've added a third production to our season this fall to give our burgeoning enrollment of theater students more opportunities to work on fully staged projects.

"Audiences can anticipate an enthralling theatrical journey; the 2005-06 season promises a timeless, tuneful, hilarious and heartbreaking search for the truth of the human spirit-the very essence of what great theater is all about."

Opening the season on the Tomlinson Theater mainstage October 6-15, 2005, is Stephen Sondheim's celebrated Tony-winning musical Company, about Robert, a 30-something New York City bachelor, ambivalent about love and afraid of commitment and the vortex of his group of married friends swirling about him. Produced in celebration of the composer/lyricist's 75th birthday, Company epitomizes how Sondheim has redefined the American Broadway musical.

From midtown Manhattan, the scene changes to Trinidad with the Temple Theaters staging of Mustapha Matura's Playboy of the West Indies making its Philadelphia premiere October 27-November 5 in Randall Theater. Adapted from J.M. Synge's classic Irish comedy, the play is set in a laid-back rum shop where the arrival of a mysterious and roguish young man named Ken wreaks havoc on the women, and the men, of this once-sleepy island village. On the lam for the supposed murder of his tyrannical father, he wins the heart of Peggy, the shop owner's daughter, then finds himself facing his revengeful father who unexpectedly appears on the scene.

An annual favorite, Philadelphia Young Playwrights brings enhanced workshop productions of the 2005 winning plays written by area high school students and directed by area professionals to the Tomlinson Theater November 3-5.

Wendy Wasserstein's witty and incisive The Heidi Chronicles made history when it won both the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Wasserstein, and was hailed by Variety as "the play of the season." This comic yet bittersweet commentary on contemporary life takes the Randall Theater stage November 17-December 3. Follow Heidi Holland and a few close friends from a mid-'60s high school dance through three decades of sweeping social change in America. The drama zooms in on key moments of their coming-of-age in a society filled with uncertainty, their newfound ideals tempered by the reality of careers, partners and parenthood.

It's madcap, bawdy farce when On the Razzle rocks Tomlinson Theater February 9-18, 2006. Playwright Tom Stoppard pulls out all the stops with his high-energy, boisterous tale of two naive and naughty grocery clerks who take off on a zany adventure in Vienna while their boss is away on a romantic rendezvous. The plot, of course, thickens, and this riotous romp boasts Stoppard's trademark mistaken identities, malapropisms and wordplay.

Award-wining playwright Romulus Linney's adaptation of Ernest Gaines' prize-winning novel, A Lesson Before Dying, makes its Philadelphia premiere on the stage of the Randall Theater March 16-25, 2006. The powerful, heart-rending play turns on the fate of Jefferson, a young black man sentenced to die by an all-white jury for a crime he did not commit. When his godmother pleads with Grant Wiggins, the local plantation teacher, to restore Jefferson's sense of self-worth before he dies, both men find themselves forever changed by their encounter. In an interview earlier this year, Linney said of his searing drama, "If ... you don't face the complexity of life, or the amorality of life, or the devastation of life-for instance what's just happened in India with the tsunami disasters-if you don't face the fact that life is like that, you're not being honest."

Temple Theaters will give Shakespeare's timeless masterwork Hamlet a fiercely penetrating "up close and personal" look in an innovative chamber version, performed by a small ensemble of actors in the intimacy of Randall Theater April 12-22. It promises to bring the raging internal and external conflicts of Shakespearean tragedy into sharp focus in a theatrical event not to be missed.

Performances are presented in the Tomlinson and Randall theaters in the Temple Theaters complex, 13th and Norris streets.

Ticket information: Season subscription (general admission) for seven plays is $72; single tickets are $18. Seniors, students, and Temple employees and alumni pay $63 for a discount season subscription and $13 for single tickets. For more information about season subscriptions, call the Temple Theaters Information Line at 215-204-1122, or visit us on the Web at www.temple.edu/theater.

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