PlayMakers Repertory Company releases its 2012-13 season

In September, an intriguing line-up of modern American stories and commissioned premieres will begin for PlayMakers Repertory Company.

In an email announcement Wednesday, PlayMakers released its 2012-13 season.

The nine-show season will include two commissioned, or fully financed, original performances.

The first is a mainstage adaptation of Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid” in October.

“It’s 300 years old and it remains the best play ever written about health care,” said Joseph Haj, producing artistic director for PlayMakers.

The second commissioned work is an untitled project in conjunction with Carolina Performing Arts, which last July received $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund productions inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring.”

As part of the “The Rite of Spring” project, which is celebrating the ballet’s 2013 centennial anniversary, PlayMakers will feature a performance by slam poetry group Universes.

It is one of 15 events coming to UNC funded by Carolina Performing Arts, said Ellen James, marketing manager for the executive office for the arts.

Hannah Grannemann, managing director for PlayMakers, said the chance to partner with Carolina Performing Arts for such a production is thrilling.

After three years presenting two-part epics in repertory, PlayMakers will stage two portraits of America — 1959’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and 2010’s “Clybourne Park,” which was written as a response to “Raisin”.

PlayMakers last produced two complementary plays in repertory during the 2008-09 season with “The Glass Menagerie” and “Well.”

Since then, the company has staged “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Angels in America” and this year’s “The Making of a King: Henry IV and Henry V” as twopart epics in rotating repertory.

Though other companies produce the plays within the same season or in successive years, Grannemann said PlayMakers is alone in putting them in repertory together.

“We’re the only company we know of doing them in rep,” she said. “That will really help reflect them off each other.”

The season also includes a radio play staging of “It’s A Wonderful Life” in December, and the musical “Cabaret” as the mainstage season closer.

With the schedule released, Granneman said she is looking forward to the reactions.

“We’ve been working on it for months, I’m excited to have it out in the public.”

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