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Introducing the Charles Mee Series and Edward Albee's Occupant
Signature Theatre Company is thrilled to welcome Charles Mee as our fourteenth playwright-in-residence, and to welcome back Edward Albee as our 2007-2008 Legacy Playwright.
Charles Mee is known for his radical re-interpretations of existing plays, from classical theatre to modern drama, as well as the collage-like style in which he writes. His plays heavily rely on music, dance, intense visual imagery, and a free-wheeling, kinetic energy. Signature Founding Artistic Director James Houghton looks forward to the passion and drive Mee will bring to the process, as well as his generous and open spirit of collaboration. "He really loves the collaborative experience and seems to thrive in that setting, which is reflected in his work," says Houghton. "The plays have a fearless quality; they're wide open and contain the possibility of going just about anywhere."
The 2007-2008 Signature Season will feature three new works that span the range of Charles Mee's eclectic and ever-growing body of work. Mee's long-time collaborator Tina Landau, who has directed the premieres of Mee's plays Orestes, Trojan Women a Love Story, Time to Burn, and Berlin Circle, directs the New York premiere of Iphigenia 2.0, a re-imagining of the ancient Greek drama Iphigenia at Aulis, set in the world today. Queens Boulevard (the musical), is a glorious ode to the diversity and vitality of the titular New York City borough in which classical Indian dance drama meets the American musical. Davis McCallum, whose Mee credits include A Perfect Wedding and Big Love, directs. In Paradise Park, a young man buys a ticket to an amusement park that becomes a thrilling and chaotic roller coaster ride through all of America. Daniel Fish, who directed the American premiere of Mee's True Love at New York's Zipper Theatre in 2001, directs. "Taken together they represent the impulses I'm mostly dealing with: thinking about classical work, thinking about music and movement and text together, and then thinking about collage," says Mee, of the season, adding, "I don't know a greater honor that could come to an American playwright than a season at the Signature. At the same time, it's a really intense, purely personal pleasure to be able to see so many plays altogether and to think again about a life's work and what still might be done to change the totality of it in some way."
Following Paradise Park, Signature presents Edward Albee's Occupant, his investigation into the life and mind of the enigmatic American sculptor Louise Nevelson. Edward Albee was the 1993-1994 Signature Playwright-in-Residence, concluding what had been a ten-year absence from the New York stage. Signature presented the New York premieres of Marriage Play; a double bill of Counting the Ways and Listening; "Sand," an evening of the three plays Box, The Sandbox and Finding the Sun; and Fragments. Signature presented Edward Albee's Occupant in 2002 during the Tenth Anniversary All-Premiere Celebration, Part Two. The play starred Anne Bancroft as Nevelson opposite Neal Huff as The Man. Ms. Bancroft fell ill during the performance run and the play never opened to the press. "We were never able to really complete that experience," says Houghton, of the original production. "So we are happy to revisit Edward Albee's Occupant and explore it as a new play. I think Edward's really excited to come back to it as well."
Edward Albee's Occupant also continues Signature's Legacy Program, which welcomes back previous Signature Playwrights-in-Residence after their seasons have ended. As the latest Legacy Playwright Albee joins past Playwrights-in-Residence Horton Foote and John Guare, who revisited their plays The Trip to Bountiful and Landscape of the Body with Signature during the 2005-2006 Fifteenth Anniversary Celebration: Part One. "It's been a thrill to have the writers back," says Houghton. "The Legacy Program is definitely here to stay and we will continue to develop and fully integrate it into our future programming and our new home."
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