Season 14

We got past unlucky 13, and Mobtown is ready to go with its 14th Season!

In September, we bring Ben Jonson’s 402 year old “heels up” to the stage – Epicoene, or the Silent Woman.. (As if!) Throughout the year, we’ll be presenting our play workshopping series, The Mobtown Playwrights Group. We’ll stage three public readings of new plays, solicit feedback from the audience, work them a little more, and then bring one of them back in July for a run of performances. Then, starting in January…. {fill in the rest}

Epicoene, or The Silent Woman

Directed by Noel Schively
by Ben Jonson — September 23-October 25
Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, select Sundays at 3pm

Morose has decided to get married and thus cut his nephew, Dauphine, out of his will. The problem? He can stand NO NOISE and must have a demure – and quiet – bride. Trouble is, he’s having trouble finding one. So Dauphine and his friend Truewit conspire to produce the eponymous Epicoene, just such a silent woman. When the musicians, a gaggle of women, Jack Daw and La Foole (two foolish knights), Cutbeard the barber dressed as a Doctor of Canon Law, and a quarreling Mr. and Mrs. Tom Otter “crash” the nuptials, will anyone survive the wedding day? And if so, will Dauphine get the money? Championed by John Dryden as “the pattern of a perfect play,” Epicoene was penned by Ben Jonson – the second best playwright of the 17th century.

No Exit

Directed by Brian S. Kraszewski
by Jean-Paul Sartre — January 20-February 11
Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, select Sundays at 3pm

“Hell… is other people.” Many have offered their opinions on what the afterlife might be like for the damned. Sartre presents us with a room and three people who at first glance may be in the wrong place. It does not take long for each to pick away at the others to reveal their true natures and the method with which they will be tortured for eternity. Don’t miss our new translation of this existential masterpiece.

Darwin in Malibu

Directed by Caitlin Bouxsein
by Crispin Whittell — March 30-April 21
Fridays, and Saturdays at 8pm, select Sundays at 3pm

Nearly 130 years after his death, we find Charles Darwin relaxing on the beach in Malibu, sipping fruit smoothies with a girl young enough to be his daughter. As he reads trashy novels and ponders the meaning of life, he is surprised by the sudden appearance of Thomas Huxley, the biologist considered to be the greatest advocate of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Shortly after Huxley’s arrival, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce washes ashore seeking to continue to their famous 1860 debate between evolution and creationism. The argument between science and religion is cleverly transformed into this insightful comedy that asks, “Who needs evolution when you have plastic surgery?”

Bent

Directed by Will Carson
by Martin Sherman — June 1-23
Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, select Sundays at 3pm.

To run away from yourself, is to run away from the truth. And that’s just what Max has to do when Germany becomes Hitler’s Germany. In Martin Sherman’s Bent, Max will find out that you can only run so far before the truth catches up with you.

And Running Throughout The Season…

The Mobtown Playwrights Group

Produced by Brent Englar
by Various Area Playwrights!

Our second year of MPG and first in the new format was a smashing success, culminating in Jessica McHugh’s Fools Call It Fate this past July. Get in on the ground floor of three new plays. Attend readings of each work-in-progress, give feedback to the writer, and come back the following weekend to hear a revised draft. Then come back the following summer to see a full-scale production of one of the pieces developed at Mobtown.