Many elements of the just-announced 2017-18 Guthrie Theater season look familiar — there’s a Shakespeare title, a frothy comedy, a musical — but the roster continues the strides made under artistic director Joseph Haj in producing more work by women and people of color.
The biggest name among the women is Lillian Hellman. Incredibly, the autumn production of “Watch on the Rhine,” set during the tense days before the U.S. entered WWII, will be the first time the Guthrie has addressed the work of the woman who was famously played by Jane Fonda in the film “Julia.” (Hellman’s most celebrated play, “The Little Foxes,” is about to open in a Broadway revival.)
“When we were putting together last season, I thought, ‘We’ve got to make a Lillian Hellman play here,’ ” says Haj, who read several of her plays before choosing “Watch.” “Here’s one of the major figures of 20th century playwriting and we’ve never done her work?”
There’s also work by Macalester College graduate — and star of TV’s “The Walking Dead” — Danai Gurira. Her “Eclipsed” was produced on Broadway last year, but the Guthrie is taking on “Familiar,” a comedy/drama in which a Zimbabwean-American woman brings her white fiance home to meet the family in Minnesota (for one week, the run of “Familiar” will overlap with the Guthrie’s production of a new take on the film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” in which a white woman brings her African-American boyfriend home to meet the ‘rents).
Haj says he and some Guthrie staffers and board members attended a New York production of “Familiar” a year ago and had barely reached the lobby afterward before they started talking about getting the rights to the play.
The Guthrie will also present the world premiere of Kia Corthron’s “An Enemy of the People,” based on the Henrik Ibsen classic about a whistleblower in a Norwegian spa town whose efforts to draw attention to the problem of polluted water backfire on him. One of the first plays slotted in the season, “Enemy” will bring to the Guthrie British director Lyndsey Turner, with whom Haj says he has long wanted to work.
Another bold new voice in playwriting is Matthew Lopez, whose “The Whipping Man” was presented by Minnesota Jewish Theatre last month. Lopez will reach the Guthrie stage with a show in which an Elvis impersonator transforms himself into a drag queen in “The Legend of Georgia McBride.”
Two not-so-new voices will return to the Guthrie stage: William Shakespeare, with the classic tale of star-crossed love, “Romeo and Juliet,” directed by Haj. And Noel Coward, with the beloved farce about a woman who returns from the dead to haunt her husband and his new wife, “Blithe Spirit.”
“I think sometimes the common perception is we figure out 10 plays and go out and do them. But we spend so much time, perhaps in ways that aren’t easily readable in the community, curating a season, asking, ‘How do these plays speak to each other?’ ” says Haj, adding that he’s thrilled, for instance, by the fact that Hellman and Coward, in roughly the same time period, created very different responses to the early years of World War II.
The holiday perennial “A Christmas Carol” will return to haunt Ebenezer Scrooge again. In addition, the season includes two titles that can’t be announced until April 17. One will continue the Guthrie’s tradition of summer musicals and the other is billed as a being from a “celebrated female playwright/director duo,” which suggests several possibilities: Paula Vogel/Rebecca Taichman? Sarah Ruhl/Taichman? Or, most likely, since it would continue the Oregon Shakespeare Festival connection that Haj has brought with him to the Guthrie, Lynn Nottage and Kate Whoriskey’s “Sweat,” which is about to open on Broadway and which the Guthrie participated in the development of.
Season tickets go on sale May 19. For more information about shows and dates, visit guthrietheater.org.
