| With public toilets, Martha Stewart, interrogation and a mystery story whose protagonist is named after a fish, Ground Zero Theatre’s 2006-07 season is set to open the floodgates of the brash and the audacious for the coming year. And how better to start the theatre flowing than with a fringe hit-cum-Tony-award-winning musical titled Urinetown?
Opening at the Grand on September 5, Greg Kotis’s Urinetown is the story of a dire little city facing a water shortage – nodding in no small part to the iconoclastic world of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. With the city’s reliance on a single company’s public pay toilets, a revolution is inevitable. It’s a large, collaborative effort between Ground Zero and newcomer Hit & Myth, and it’s a full-fledged musical – the kind that tugs at the nostalgia of artistic director Ryan Luhning.
"I played Orin the Dentist in Little Shop of Horrors many, many moons ago," he says. "I have always wanted to do a musical at GZT, and Urinetown is perfect. With Hit & Myth involved, it was able to become a reality."
Following its foray into popular bathroom uprising, starting November 16, Ground Zero will be revisiting local actress and playwright Lindsay Burns’s Dough: The Politics of Martha Stewart, a one-woman piece that spins its nine characters around the eponymous and infamous home improvement maven. From its creation at Theatre Junction’s Random Acts Festival, to Ground Zero’s recently created second-stage showcase, Groundbreakers, this production will mark the third time that Calgary audiences have seen Burns’s stab at the notion of the pop culture drive to "have it all."
Marking Ground Zero’s second collaboration with Hit & Myth, The Pillowman wades into darker waters, with its look at a police interrogation under a totalitarian state.
"I saw The Pillowman twice in New York last summer," says Luhning. "I broke my neck to get the rights to it. I have never seen a play that affected an audience so much on so many different levels."
Oscillating between dark humour and the genuinely disturbing, British playwright Martin McDonagh received the 2004 Olivier Award after the play’s 2003 première, in New York with Jeff Goldblum in 2005. The play will open in Calgary at Vertigo’s Studio Theatre on March 8.
Finally, reversing its usual position in the season, Ground Zero, along with The Blacklist Theatre Project, FireBelly Theatre and the University of Calgary Department of Drama, will present the sixth annual alumni show on May 2. This year, Claudia Dey’s Trout Stanley will bring a cast of eccentric characters to the Reeve Theatre, including a pair of fraternal twins celebrating their 30th birthday, just as a stripper/Scrabble champion goes missing, and the titular drifter who arrives in a police uniform.
From the wet to the eccentric, the doughy to the dark, Ground Zero Theatre promises to wade deeply through the 2006-07 season.
Ground Zero’s 2006-07 Groundbreakers lineup, running at the Pumphouse Theatres, will not be announced until September. |
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