Pictured: Kristine Thatcher

Artistic Director and Producer Terry McCabe has announced the four productions that will make up City Lit Theater’s 18/19 season.

The season begins in September and includes three full-length plays and a double-bill of one-acts, starting with George Bernard Shaw’s ARMS AND THE MAN, to be directed by Brian Pastor. The Shaw comedy will be followed in November by the world premiere of Kristine Thatcher’s A SAFE PLACE, a play commissioned by City Lit, and directed by McCabe. In January, the company will present the early 17th-Century FUENTE OVEJUNA by Lope de Vega. The season concludes with TWO DAYS IN COURT, a double bill of Stephen Vincent Benet’s THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER and Gilbert and Sullivan’s one-act operetta TRIAL BY JURY. Both productions will be directed by McCabe with TRIAL BY JURY music directed by Daniel Robinson and Kingsley Day playing the Judge.

City Lit Theater’s 2018/19 season (from the press release):

ARMS AND THE MAN
By George Bernard Shaw
Directed by Brian Pastor
September 7 – October 21, 2018
Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm, Sundays at 3:00 pm.

City Lit’s first Shaw play. Bluntschli, a Swiss soldier fonder of chocolates than of bullets, hides in the bedroom of Bulgarian heiress Raina while escaping from battle—a development that disturbs her fiancé Sergius, a swaggering cavalry-officer from the other side. Shaw calls it “an anti-romantic comedy.” George Orwell said ARMS AND THE MAN was probably the wittiest play (Shaw) ever wrote, the most flawless technically, and in spite of being a very light comedy, the most telling, because its moral—that war is not a wonderful, romantic adventure—still needs to be told.

THE SAFE HO– USE – World Premiere
By Kristine Thatcher
Directed by Terry McCabe
November 2 – December 16, 2018

Commissioned by City Lit and two years in the writing, a world premiere by the award-winning playwright of EMMA’S CHILD and VOICE OF GOOD HOPE. A woman returns to her home town and family for a visit. Suddenly she must look differently at the safest place she’s ever known.

FUENTE OVEJUNA
By Lope de Vega
Newly adapted by Terry McCabe based on a literal translation by Stanley Appelbaum.
Directed by Terry McCabe
January 4 – February 17, 2019

Ripped from today’s the 15th Century’s headlines, a young woman of the Spanish village Fuente Ovejuna in 1476 inspires and leads a rebellion against their military governor’s sexual exploitation of local women. Laurencia refuses to be a victim when she is attacked and rallies the town to do something, finally, about the oppression that has gone on too long. This classic play by Lope de Vega, a writer considered second only to Cervantes in the canon of Spanish literature, was first published in 1619.

TWO DAYS IN COURT
A double-header of classic one-acts:
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER by Stephen Vincent Benet,
and TRIAL BY JURY by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
Directed by Terry McCabe
Music Directed by Daniel Robinson
April 12 – May 26, 2019

Come for the greatest orator of early America arguing contract law with Satan, stay for the riotous musical farce with a plot too ridiculous to summarize. In THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER, adapted for the stage by Stephen Vincent Benet from his 1936 short story.