Nicholas Rudall, who will pen City Lit’s new translation of PROMETHEUS BOUND (Photo by Joe Mazza/Brave Lux)

City Lit Theater has announced the line-up for its 38th season which opens with Chicago’s first look in a century at an Irish classic, DEIRDRE OF THE SORROWS by John Millington Synge directed by Kay Martinovich. The season continues with Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning J.B. directed by Brian Pastor, and THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY adapted by Paul Edwards, with a yet-to-be-announced director. The season finishes up with Aeschylus’ PROMETHEUS BOUND featuring a world premiere translation commissioned by City Lit from Court Theatre Founding Artistic Director Nicholas Rudall and an original score by Chicago composer Kingsley Day. Artistic Director Terry McCabe will lead the production. “PROMETHEUS BOUND is a work of challenging beauty,” Rudall said, “and City Lit is a perfect place to explore its lyricism and its politics.”

City Lit Theater’s 2017/18 Season (from the press release):

DEIRDRE OF THE SORROWS
By John Millington Synge
Directed by Kay Martinovich
September 1 – October 15, 2017

The final masterpiece of John Millington Synge (author of THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD) is a dramatization of the ancient Irish legend of Deirdre, foretold at birth to become the most beautiful woman in Ireland and therefore betrothed as an infant to the King of Ulster. Now grown, she rejects the arranged marriage and flees Ireland with her lover, the great warrior Naisi. City Lit’s production will be the play’s first Chicago production since that of the legendary Chicago Little Theatre in 1917.

J.B.
By Archibald MacLeish
Directed by Brian Pastor
October 27- December 10, 2017

J.B., is a modern retelling of the biblical Book of Job. J.B. is the happiest of men, and God’s most loyal servant until God takes a bet from Satan’s that Satan can make JB so miserable JB will curse God. City Lit’s production will feature an ensemble of nine women over the age of 55 as the twenty-three men, women, and children in the play’s cast of characters.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
By Oscar Wilde
Adapted for the stage by Paul Edwards
March 2 – April 15, 2018

Oscar Wilde’s only novel ranks with FRANKENSTEIN and THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE as a defining excursion into psychological horror. Dorian Gray expresses the desire that his newly painted portrait, rather than he, will age and fade. This idle, destructive wish is granted: Dorian stays young and beautiful while his portrait ages and takes on the weight of his sins. He is both fascinated and trapped by this fatal freedom from responsibility, and enters a life of hedonism. Three-time Jeff Award winner for Best Adaptation Paul Edwards returns to City Lit for his eighth production.

PROMETHEUS BOUND
By Aeschlyus
WORLD PREMIERE TRANSLATION by Nicholas Rudall
April 27 – June 10, 2018

A world premiere translation of Aeschylus’ theatrically boldest tragedy, commissioned by City Lit from Nicholas Rudall, Founding Director of Court Theater and internationally acclaimed award-winning translator of Greek drama. The titan Prometheus, friend of humankind, is chained—and fastened with a spike through his chest–to a mountain as punishment for instilling in the human race the capacity for hope, thereby spoiling Zeus’s plan to wipe out the human race and replace it with something better. Prometheus’s parade of visitors includes gods, sea nymphs, and Io – a woman whom Zeus has turned into a cow. The production will feature human actors only as Prometheus and Io. The other characters, all supernatural beings, will be portrayed by life-sized puppets.

All performances take place at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Chicago 60660 (Inside Edgewater Presbyterian Church). For more information visit citylit.org.