Three Bone Theatre announces 14th season with Tony, Pulitzer-winning plays
Fresh off a season filled with engaging shows and recouping funding to complete a history-making trilogy, Three Bone Theatre is back to announce what could be an even more daring 14th season.
The theater company announced its season schedule on Thursday ahead of the premiere of the second leg of its trilogy of plays by playwright Luis Alfaro, “Electridad.” “We are wanting to invite you all to really lean into all of it with us this season and explore different tensions between past and present, power and vulnerability and myths and truth,” Three Bone artistic and operations director Robin Tynes-Miller said.
“These are four bold, unflinching plays that have never been seen before in Charlotte and we’re really excited.”
Three Bone will kick off its 14th season in November with “Eureka Day,” a Tony-winning play by Jonathan Spector that premiered last year on Broadway and completed its original run this year. The local production will be directed by Tonya Bloodworth, who directed “The Play That Goes Wrong” for Theatre Charlotte, which premiered this year.
“Eureka Day” takes place at “a private California elementary school with a Board of Directors that values inclusion above all else – that is, until an outbreak of the mumps forces everyone in the community to reconsider the school’s liberal vaccine policy.”
“It really gets to the heart of, how do we take care of each other during a public health crisis,” Tynes-Miller said. “So this mumps outbreak happens in the community and facts become subjective.
“The central question is how do you build consensus when no one agrees on what is true? And so it’s all about vaccines and public health. It doesn’t sound hilarious, but it is hilarious.”
Following “Eureka Day” is “Primary Trust” in February. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Eboni Booth “explores the inner and outer lives of Kenneth, a heartbreakingly lonely 38-year-old man living in the small town of Cranberry, New York.” Three Bone’s education manager, Tiffany Bryant-Jackson, will be directing the play.
“This is one of my favorite plays I’ve read in probably the last decade. I loved this play,” Tynes-Miller said.
“How do we uphold each other? How do we allow ourselves and our friends and our loved ones to take the risk and take steps into becoming their full self? So it’s a beautiful play, and the quote that we’re using for it is, ‘It will restore your faith in theater’s elemental storytelling powers.’ ”
Coming in May will be the final episode in the Luis Alfaro trilogy, “Oedipus El Rey.”
This will make Three Bone the only company in the U.S. to put on all three episodes of the trilogy. And while you may expect the classic story of “Oedipus” for this play, Tynes-Miller said it’ll play with that story in new ways as Alfaro has done with his other classic plays.
“Latino stories are really important,” she said. ”They’re really important to our specific Charlotte community. They are vastly underrepresented on Charlotte stages. They’re vastly represented on American stages. How do we continue to support that within the storytelling and theater community?”
The play will be directed by Ron Oden, who’s the executive director of the Lee Street Theatre in Salisbury and has designed sets for Three Bone in the past.
The final play is one that Tynes-Miller says is a first for the company. To cap off the season, Three Bone will present “Sovereignty” by Mary Kathryn Nagle. It’ll be the first project focused on the Indigenous experience.
Tynes-Miller said folks who saw “Confederate” will be familiar with the structure of this play.
A young Cherokee lawyer in modern day Oklahoma defends the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation at the U.S. Supreme Court. She also jumps to the past and wrestles with the actions of her ancestors during the New Echota Treaty, which is what the Cherokee signed and led to the Trail of Tears, and the removal of indigenous people from their lands.
“Nagle is also a practicing lawyer, and so she puts a lot of that into this story. We are anticipating hiring local performers and artists, and really hoping to find some local Indigenous artists who want to be part of the project,” she said.
“We will likely be bringing in Cherokee, or Indigenous actors and artists from Eastern Band Cherokee in western North Carolina, but also potentially from outside of the state,” Tynes-Miller said. “We’ve had on our equity plan for a long time to kind of reevaluate and really sit with the representation of Indigenous stories in our programming and in the American theater at large. And we’re really excited to bring this to Charlotte.”
She also expects the production to generate a lot of conversation, adding that it brings to mind a lot of how we view land in this country.
“I feel like there’s this gap right now in the United States between looking at history as nostalgia and looking at history in a more critical (way), wanting to understand and recognize patterns of erasure and colonialism, and the impact of that still today, those are really key things to explore for how we move forward as a nation, and how we continue to interact with each other with the land of this country.”
The full schedule for Three Bone Theatre’s 14th season is available online at threebonetheatre.com.
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