Theatre News Wire

Artistic Director Chay Yew and Executive Director Jan Kallish announce the 2012-2013 Victory Gardens season. The season will include Equivocation by Bill Cain, directed by Sean Graney; Failure: A Love Story by Phillip Dawkins, directed by Seth Bockley; Disconnect by Anupama Chandrasekhar, directed by Dexter Bullard; The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Joanie Schultz; and Chicago is Burning by Marcus Gardley, directed by Chay Yew.

Artistic Director Chay Yew comments, "Victory Gardens Theater is home to dynamic plays that celebrate, reflect and challenge the attitudes in our beautiful, diverse city and the world. As an artistic and social center for Chicago's myriad cultural communities, VG is a place for civil discourse and exploration of our society's timely concerns through the power of theatre and the magic of live performance. It is with this inspiration that we have created our 2012-13 season. These brave new plays examine the importance of home and family: where we find home, and how we create and preserve it in unlikely contexts."

Victory Gardens explores ideas of home this 2012-13 season: An artist struggling to write propaganda for a homeland security crisis; a morbidly obese gay man attempting to build a home with his estranged daughter; the magical fable of three Chicago sisters who share a lively and love-filled home in the 1920s; a collection office in India where its workers dream of America; and the ball scene of Southside Chicago, where homeless youths create their own home where they can be a star or model for a night.

The 2012-13 Victory Gardens Season includes:

Equivocation
by Bill Cain
directed by Sean Graney
September 14- October 14, 2012

In London in the year 1605, a down-and-out playwright called Shagspeare (yes, it's him) receives a royal commission to write a play promoting the government's version of Guy Fawkes' treasonous Gunpowder Plot. As Shag navigates the dangerous course between writing a lie and losing his soul, or writing the truth and losing his head, his devoted theatre troupe helps him negotiate each step along the way. At once an explosive comedy of ideas and a high-stakes political thriller, Bill Cain's award-winning Equivocation deftly reveals the cat-and-mouse games in politics and art, and the craft of learning how to speak the truth in difficult times.

Failure: A Love Story
by Philip Dawkins
directed by Seth Bockley
November 16-December 30, 2012

1928 is the last year of each of the Fail Sisters' lives. Nelly was the first of the Fail girls to die, followed soon after by her sisters Jenny June and Gerty. As with so many things in life-blunt objects, disappearances and consumption-they never saw death coming. Written by Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins, Failure: A Love Story is a magical, musical fable that traces the sisters' triumphs and defeats, lived out in the rickety two-story building by the Chicago River that was the Fail family home and clock shop. This funny, moving and profoundly wise play reminds us that in the end, all that remains is love.

Disconnect
by Anupama Chandrasekhar
directed by Dexter Bullard
January 25 - February 24, 2013

Fortysomething Avinash is hopelessly out of step in a company that demands success, energy and youth. To bring his game up, he is transferred to work with the bright young graduates in Illinois-down on the fourth floor. In the windowless, nighttime offices of a call center in Chennai, India, is a bustling world of energetic Indian workers dreaming the American Dream and faking U.S. accents to target their American "marks" maxed out on credit cards. Anupama Chandrasekhar's Disconnect is a powerful and witty drama about the consequences of consumer culture and the intricacies of our interconnected global economy.

The Whale
by Samuel D. Hunter
directed by Joanie Schultz
April 5 - May 5, 2013

Since the death of his boyfriend, morbidly obese 600 pound Charlie has confined himself to his small Idaho apartment and is eating himself to oblivion. With his health quickly failing, Charlie becomes desperate to reconnect with Ellie, his estranged and angry teenage daughter whom he has not seen in 17 years. He would give her anything: his love, his money....maybe even his life. Written by Obie Award-winning playwright Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale is a tough, humorous and emotionally powerful play about how we cope with loss, and how new definitions of family, friends and religion shape our lives.

Chicago is Burning
by Marcus Gardley
directed by Chay Yew
May 31- Jun 30, 2013

Set in Bronzeville in Chicago, the exhilarating drama with music Chicago is Burning takes you to the underground ball competitions where anyone in the communities in this African American and Latino, gay and transgender subculture can be a star or a supermodel for one night. They've come to strike a pose, vogue, walk, dance, compete, love, bitch and be themselves. The multiple award-winning young playwright Marcus Gardley and Victory Gardens Artistic Director Chay Yew team up for a celebration of a new kind of American family built across lines of race, class and gender.