Five works will debut from August to April, including Sarah Silverman’s musical “The Bedwetter” and an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo.”
Atlantic Theater Company will spring back to life this summer with an ambitious five-premiere season. The theater’s Off Broadway productions, announced Tuesday, include Sarah Silverman’s musical “The Bedwetter,” an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo” and a new play by Ngozi Anyanwu.
Anyanwu, a playwright-actor whose work “The Homecoming Queen” was staged there in 2018, returns in August with “The Last of the Love Letters.” Patricia McGregor will direct. The play is about two people wrestling with “the thing they love most” and questioning “whether to stick it out or to leave it behind,” according to the theater.
The musical adaptation of “Kimberly Akimbo,” with music by Jeanine Tesori, will debut 20 years after Lindsay-Abaire’s play was first produced at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif. It tells the story of a teenage girl with a condition that has left her with the health and appearance of a 72-year-old. In his 2003 review of the Manhattan Theater Club production of the dark comedy, Ben Brantley called it “haunting and hilarious.”
Silverman’s show, based on her 2010 memoir, will arrive in 2022, nearly two years after it had originally been scheduled to receive its world premiere. The company noted that Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the music and collaborated with Silverman on the lyrics, will not be present when the cast takes its first bows next April. He died in 2020 of Covid-19 complications.
The second half of the season will also feature “SHHHHH,” a new play by Clare Barron, which she will direct and perform in, and Sanaz Toossi’s “English,” about four adult students in Iran preparing for a language test.
More information about the season is available at atlantictheater.org.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
