2018/19 Season

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The 2018/19 Season is marked by its international scope, lifting up stories from the Harlem of Langston Hughes to the streets of contemporary Cairo, from a small island in South Korea to the barber shops of Accra, Kampala, and Johannesburg. I am thrilled to be celebrating my tenth anniversary at the A.R.T. with a season embodying our commitment to daring new work that expands the boundaries of theater. Featuring multiple world premieres, next season will engage audiences around vital stories of resistance and resilience from around the globe.

Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director Diane Paulus

The Black Clown

The Black Clown is a world premiere music theater experience that fuses vaudeville, gospel, opera, jazz, and spirituals to bring Langston Hughes’ verse to life onstage and animate a Black man’s resilience against a legacy of oppression. The production features Davóne Tines (Crossing and Run AMOC! Festival) in the title role, an ensemble of twelve, and a new score by Michael Schachter (Run AMOC! Festival).

ExtraOrdinary

In celebration of the past ten years of musical theater at the A.R.T., audiences are invited to join returning artists for songs and stories from the past decade of boundary-breaking musicals, including The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, Pippin, Prometheus Bound, Waitress, and Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.

Barber Shop Chronicles

Newsroom and political platform, confession box and stadium—for generations, barber shops have been places where African men gather to discuss the world. Leaping from London to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos, and Accra, Inua Ellams’ dynamic new play traces the global ties between these spaces where the banter can be barbed and the truth is always telling. Barber Shop Chronicles arrives in Cambridge as part of its US premiere tour following critically acclaimed runs at London’s National Theatre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Othello

In Shakespeare’s most intimate tragedy, director Bill Rauch (All the Way, Fingersmith) explores society’s polarizing struggles with difference. Consumed by their bigotry and xenophobia, those who praised the Moorish general Othello for his military successes now reject his marriage to Desdemona. The newlyweds are determined to overcome this resentment, but Othello’s assignment in Cyprus draws them into the web of his lieutenant Iago, whose jealousy knows no bounds. A.R.T. brings the original company of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s acclaimed production to Cambridge.

Endlings

On the Korean island of Man-Jae, three elderly women spend their dying days diving into the ocean and harvesting seafood with rusty knives. They are “haenyeos”—sea women—and they have no heirs to their millennium-old tradition. Directed by Sammi Cannold (Violet at A.R.T., Ragtime on Ellis Island), Celine Song’s Endlings follows these extraordinary women both on land and underwater as they swim beneath the waves and reach beyond the shores of their tiny island.

We Live in Cairo

Inspired by the young Egyptians who took to the streets to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, this new musical follows six revolutionary students armed with laptops and cameras, guitars and spray cans as they come of age in a contemporary Cairo. Winner of the 2016 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater.

Formerly known as OBERON Presents, the A.R.T. Breakout series presents cutting-edge performances that push theatrical boundaries at OBERON and beyond. Tickets to A.R.T. Breakout performances are available as add-ons to subscription packages—single tickets will go on sale to the general public later this year.

Borrowed Cash

Borrowed Cash is back! The band you know and love with hit songs “Can’t Let Go,” “Passionate Kisses,” “When She Loved Me,” and “Leave Your Hat On.”* And this time, we think band members Ann Marie Mayfield and Harper Stanton just might get through the tour without strangling each other!

Ann Marie and Harper skyrocketed to international popularity with their first hit record Passionate Kisses, but their careers came to a screeching and scandalous halt when the world discovered the shocking truth behind their success. After years of not speaking to each other, living out of cars, bouts of incarceration, appearing as celebrity judges on Japanese game shows, and frequent emotional breakdowns, the dynamic duo is hoping to win back the love and trust of their embittered fans in the Busted Tour. See them together again, for the first time, in this multi-media live concert event featuring surprising and revealing documentary footage of the meteoric rise and fall of America’s sweethearts.

*We are currently unable to comment on claims that these songs are actually by Randy Newman or Lucinda Williams.

Miss You Like Hell

Sixteen-year-old Olivia hasn’t seen her mother Beatriz in years, but—surprise!—mom just showed up in the middle of the night, with a pickup truck, the promise of the open road… and an immigration hearing looming at journey’s end. Company One returns to OBERON with a powerful new musical odyssey about a daughter who gets to stay, a mother who might have to leave, and the border wall that could come between them. Quiara Alegría Hudes and Erin McKeown’s Miss You Like Hell explores how many miles we can travel with the help of courageous neighbors and beautiful strangers.

ANTHEM: An Evening with Justice Ameer and Chrysanthemum Tran

ANTHEM is a debut two-woman show featuring Justice Ameer and Chrysanthemum Tran, esteemed Rhode Island-based poets and performers. From praise songs to war cries to bops you can’t help but dance to, anthems have long been the heartbeat of political liberation. ANTHEM, an hour-long performance, explores how race and gender politics shape reality for transgender woman of color. An indictment of a nation determined to police freedom and livelihood yet rallying declaration of our militant survival, ANTHEM reveals the lasting legacies of trans women who fought before us and celebrates the communities for whom joy is too often an afterthought. Our voices and our fists are raised. ANTHEM is unapologetic in saying: in the shadow of a world that wants us dead, we will not go down with a fight. We will survive.

Dragon Cycle

After a run at OBERON in the spring of 2018, virtuosic performer Sara Porkalob returns with Dragon Lady, and also turns her attention to another chapter of her family’s history with Dragon Mama, the second piece in her Dragon Cycle.

Dragon Lady—Return Engagement
It is the year of the Water Dragon and the eve of Grandma Maria’s 60^th birthday. By the light of the karaoke machine, fueled by pork dumplings and Diet Pepsi, she shares a dark secret from her Filipino gangster past with one lucky grandchild. Traversing 50 years of faulty family memories, Seattle-based performer Sara Porkalob returns to share this timely new musical about what it means to come to America.

Dragon Mama
How does a Dragon earn her wings? Maria Porkalob, Jr. yearns for a gayer, more POC-filled life than Bremerton, WA can offer. When presented with an opportunity to make a quick fortune, Maria must make an important decision: leave her debt-ridden mother, four young siblings, and newborn daughter for the wild unknown of Alaska, or stay close to home, family, and intergenerational trauma. The second play in her Dragon Cycle, Sara Porkalob’s new solo show traverses 25 years of her mother’s life filled with queer love in a barren land, a dope 90s R&B soundtrack, and Filipino gangsters. This is Dragon Mama.

Clairvoyance

Diana Oh is a witch. She knows it. So do her closest friends. Clairvoyance runs in her family. She went to a spiritual counselor in the jungle in Thailand, and the spiritual counselor told her to sing and go wild in Boston. Everything else the spiritual counselor said came true, so Diana is doing it. Clairvoyance is an exchange of energy designed to bypass the bullshit and celebrate the knowledge of our bodies. It’s a concert, it’s a party, with moments of divination. Diana Oh performs her original soul, pop, rock, and punk music from journal entries and the beyond. She is one of Refinery 29’s Top 14 LGBTQ Influencers, creator of {my lingerie play}, and the first Queer Korean-American interviewed on Korean Broadcast Radio. Upworthy and The Wall Street Journal call her “Badass.” The New York Times calls her “Irreverent.” You can call her “Friend.”

Tori Scott: Tori Scott is #Thirsty
October 11, 2018 at 8PM
“The Bette Midler of the new millennium” (Provincetown Magazine) performs a shameless musical journey of autobiographical stories.

Taja Lindley: The Bag Lady Manifesta
November 15, 2018 at 8PM
An installation and performance ritual through movement, burlesque, and more for a world that treats Black life as if it is disposable.

Dan Fishback: Dan Fishback Alone!
January 17, 2019 at 8PM
The scrappy singer-songwriter returns to his roots for an evening of songs about tender feelings and global intentions to help you bandage your broken heart for battle.

Desiree Burch: Unf*ckable
February 21, 2019 at 8PM
From dealing with sex in the workplace, to adventures in sex work, Desiree investigates the drives women have to stop sex from becoming work.

The Bearded Ladies Cabaret: John Jarboe as Mx. Rogers in a Musical Healing Ritual for Adults: You Can Never Go Down the Drain
March 14, 2019 at 8PM
A goldfish funeral, gay romps into the land of make-believe, and some earnest questions about irony using and abusing iconic songs from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

Tori Scott: Tori Scott is Pickled!
April 18, 2019 at 8PM
Tori is back and she still hasn’t learned from her mistakes and she’s decided to examine her life, one martini at a time.

STL GLD
August 3, 2018
The Boston Music Award-winning hip hop group returns to kick off Live @ OBERON.

Camino 84
September 7, 2018
Local disco/funk band brings special guests for an immersive live music experience.

Samora Pinderhughes’ The Transformations Suite
October 6 & 7, 2018
Jazz, theater, film, and poetry combine to examine the radical history of resistance within the communities of the African diaspora.

Billy Dean Thomas
November 2, 2018
Also known as “The Queer B.I.G.”, Billy Dean is a musician who challenges the hip hop game with lyrics that align with #blacklivesmatter and intersectional feminism.

The Sweetback Sisters’ Country Christmas Singalong Spectacular
December 14 & 15, 2018
The Sweetback Sisters bring the holidays to life with their vaudevillian theatrics reminiscent of TV variety shows from the ’50s and ’60s, a holiday sing-along, and Christmas trivia.

STL GLD
February 1, 2019
Celebrate the release of The New Normal, an album for our times that sets the path for STL GLD’s evolution in 2019.

Dietrich Strause
March 1, 2019
Dietrich Strause’s songs are a mix of timeless melody, literate lyricism, and a “virtuosic command of imagery” (WBUR The ARTery).

Run AMOC! Festival

American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), the “hot-bed of boundary-pushing, inventive, chance-taking artists” (ZEALnyc) returns to A.R.T. for the second annual Run AMOC! Festival with four new pieces to be performed around Harvard Square: a cross-disciplinary dance piece exploring care and caregiving; a wild, technicolor romp through one of Bach’s most playful and transcendent works; a performance by the pianist The New Yorker calls “brilliant” and “effortlessly elegant;” and a recital featuring AMOC members’ newest collaboration.

AMOC is a new kind of opera company—comprised of a diverse collective of singers, dancers, instrumentalists, a director, and a composer—that aims to expand the definition and reach of opera in our world through collaborative, interdisciplinary work. 2018 MacArthur Fellow composer/​conductor/​pianist/​poet Matthew Aucoin (Crossing, Harvard ’12) and director/​choreographer/​dancer Zack Winokur (The Black Clown) serve as Artistic Directors.

The Donkey Show

The long-running hit The Donkey Show, directed by Diane Paulus, continues for its 10^th season at OBERON every Saturday night. Delivering the ultimate disco experience, the crazy circus of mirror balls and feathered divas, of roller skaters and hustle queens is inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The glitter-filled party rages on the dance floor to all the best 70s hits as the show unfolds around the audience. After the show, the party continues into the night so you can live out your fever fantasy.