NYTW sets next slate

Weller's 'Beast' to open season

By DAVID ROONEY

Directors Peter Brook, Jo Bonney and Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and writers Michael Weller and Naomi Wallace are among the names on New York Theater Workshop's slate for the 2008-09 season, when the company also will present its inaugural lineup of concert stagings of notable Off Broadway musicals.

Season opener is screenwriter-playwright Weller's new comedy, "Beast," which chronicles the journey home from a military hospital in Germany via Crawford, Texas, of two mutilated but still patriotic Iraq War veterans. Bonney ("The Seven") directs the production, previewing from Aug. 29.

Working at NYTW for the first time, Brook will stage "The Grand Inquisitor," Marie-Helene Estienne's adaptation of the Inquisitor section of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," running Oct. 22-Nov. 23. Co-presented with Theater for a New Audience, the play's cast includes vet Brooks collaborator Bruce Myers ("The Mahabharata").

Scheduled for spring, actor-turned-director Santiago-Hudson ("Seven Guitars") will helm Wallace's "Things of Dry Hours," a play set in Depression-era Alabama about a black Communist Sunday school teacher facing ideological conflict when he is asked to shelter a white factory worker on the run.

"These three remarkable artists' visions make up one of our most cohesive and thoughtful seasons ever," said NYTW artistic director Jim Nicola.

Conceived as an Off Broadway equivalent of the Encores! concert stagings that showcase underappreciated Rialto musicals of the past, the first season of NYTW's "Off Again" series will feature Maria Irene Fornes and Al Carmines' "Promenade," Peter Link's "Iphigenia in Concert," directed by Annie Dorsen ("Passing Strange"), and "The Waves," written by Lisa Peterson and composed by David Buckham, based on the Virginia Woolf novel. Dates for the limited runs have not yet been announced.

In the runup to the November elections, NYTW also will present a series of politically themed events, including a reading of Gore Vidal's 1968 play, "Weekend," about the Republican Party's struggle to reinvent itself after Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election.