Wednesday, November 12, 2008

What Artistic Director Paul Douglas Michnewicz calls the Feminine Metaphor is the theme for the 2009 Theater Alliance season.

"The Women of Tin Pan Alley" (Feb. 5-22), a cabaret revue conceived by Joanne Schmoll and staged by Jessica Burgess, celebrates women who contributed to the Great American Songbook, among them Billie Holiday, Kay Swift and Dorothy Fields.

"The Bread of Winter" (April 16-May 9) by Victor Lodato, is set on a future Earth that has gone cold and where the maternal instinct has gone extinct. Michnewicz says the play will "rock the town . . . it's so harsh and hard. It's so beautiful." Dorothy Neumann will direct.

Kasi Campbell will stage Lodato's "The Woman Who Amuses Herself" (May 15-June 6), a comedy based on the true story of an Italian man in the early 1900s who briefly became a folk hero by stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and returning it to Italy.

In Adam Bock's "Five Flights" (June 12-28), a family argues over what to do with an aviary their father had built to house their mother's soul. Shirley Serotsky will direct.