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Inside Scoop

2021/22 Season Fun Facts

To celebrate our return to live, in-person theater, we've put together our version of "Spark Notes" about each production in our 2021/22 season. Get excited about our new line-up of plays with these fun facts.  

The Winter's Tale

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  • Including our Public Works productions of Twelfth Night (2020) and As You Like It (2019), Seattle Rep has staged more than 30 Shakespeare productions, starting with King Lear (1963), but this will be the first time we produce The Winter’s Tale. 
  • Over 250 community actors have performed on our stages (in person or virtual) since Seattle Rep presented its first Public Works production of The Odyssey in 2017. 
  • The Winter’s Tale contains one of Shakespeare’s most famous stage directions: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Keep an eye out for this unique moment in our production! 
  • ICYMI: Director Desdemona Chiang and Composer Todd Almond recorded a short video about The Winter's Tale in 2020. You can watch the full video on our Instagram. 

FANNIE: THE MUSIC AND LIFE OF FANNIE LOU HAMER 

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  • Cheryl L. West is Seattle Rep’s most produced living playwright. Fannie will be our seventh full production of her work. 
  • One of Hamer’s most famous quotes adorns her tombstone: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." 
  • Fannie Lou Hamer: Speak On It!, a 30-minute version of Fannie, premiered last year at the Goodman Theatre, touring Chicago parks to encourage voting. 
  • Does Fannie sound familiar? Fannie was featured in our first virtual Plays in Process event back in January 2021. This behind-the-scenes look featured playwright Cheryl L. West and a musical performance from actor E. Faye Butler.  

Freestyle Love Supreme

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  • Kail, Miranda, and Veneziale first created Freestyle Love Supreme over 17 years ago in the basement of an independent bookstore, the Drama Book Shop. Miranda went on to purchase the bookshop with a small group of theater professionals to save it from closure in 2018. 
  • The 2020 documentary We Are Freestyle Love Supreme (available on Hulu) contains footage shot over 15 years. 
  • Freestyle Love Supreme is the recipient of a 2020 Special Tony Award®, awarded to outstanding productions, artists, and organizations that don’t fall into existing award categories. 
  • Freestyle Love Supreme is heading back to Broadway this fall! This production will feature some special appearances from the original cast, including Lin-Manuel Miranda. Plus, we've got some special surprises for audiences here in Seattle, so stay tuned. 

Teenage Dick
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  • Seattle Rep last produced Richard III in 1986. 
  • Does a Shakespeare adaptation featuring high schoolers at Seattle Rep ring a bell? In 2018 we produced Erica Schmidt’s MAC BETHwhich similarly transposed one of the Bard’s classics into the ruthless world of teenagers. 
  • Teenage Dick was commissioned and developed by The Apothetae, a New York theater company dedicated to plays that explore and illuminate the "Disabled Experience." 
  • Director Malika Oyetimein is a three time Gregory Award Nominee and is a member of the Lincoln Center Director's Lab. Teenage Dick is her first production with Seattle Rep. 

Ghosts

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  • Ghosts appeared in our Plays in Process series earlier this year and Carey Perloff was recently announced as one of the inaugural members of our director commission program, New Directions. 
  • This will be the sixth Ibsen play produced by Seattle Rep since our founding in 1963, and while we’ve never produced Ibsen’s Ghosts, our 2018 production of Ibsen in Chicago was a comedic story about an ensemble of Scandinavian immigrants attempting to put on this play. 
  • Henrik Ibsen is the second-most frequently performed playwright in the world after Shakespeare. His plays have been translated into more than 80 different languages. 
  • This translation of Ghosts originally appeared at Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2019. Director Carey Perloff and translator Paul Walsh both discuss their interpretation of this Ibsen classic in a series of interviews with the theater company. Watch them here

Selling Kabul

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  • Our commissions programs are bringing artists together for this production! Playwright Sylvia Khoury was chosen for Seattle Rep’s first round of commissions through our new initiative 20x30: Reimagining the Anthropocene. Director Valerie Curtis-Newton is in the inaugural group of directors commissioned through Seattle Rep’s New Directions program. 
  • Khoury was awarded a 2021 Whiting Award in Drama. She is in excellent company alongside previous award winners August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Tony Kushner. 
  • Selling Kabul is also an award winner. The play was featured on the 2017 Kilroys List, and has won the 2019 Edgerton and the 2018 L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Awards. 
  • Besides being an award-winning playwright, Sylvia Khoury is also a doctor. In addition to having an MFA from the New School, Khoury also holds an MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  

Bruce   

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  • Bruce is based on the book The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb, one of the screenwriters for Jaws, who is also a featured character in Bruce. 
  • The mechanical shark was named Bruce after Steven Spielberg’s lawyer by the film crew after often being told that the film couldn’t spend any more money. 
  • You can see the sole surviving full-scale shark model created for Jaws at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which is set to open on September 30, 2021 in Los Angeles. 
  • In 2020, Seattle Rep held a workshop and private reading of Bruce as part of our new play development lab, The Other Season
  • Bruce has been getting a lot of love across the internet! The news of this world-premiere musical has appeared in Playbill, Nerdist, Comicbook.com, Deadline, and more. 

 

Want the full deets about each show? Check our 2021/22 season page!

2021/22 Season  

 

Carrie Compere in Shout Sister Shout! (2019). Photo by Bronwen Houck.
Photo of Fannie Lou Hamer. Courtesy of Ken Thompson/General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church.
Utkarsh Ambudkar, Aneesa Folds, and Christopher Jackson in Freestyle Love Supreme. Photo by Joan Marcus.