A letter from the Artistic Director
Dear friend of the Next,
It’s been an extraordinary year for your theater, folks. Defiance sold more tickets than any show of ours in the past twenty years, we commissioned five new music-theater songs from some of the country’s most exciting composers, and Adding Machine: A Musical has swept into New York’s award season with 6 Lucille Lortel nominations… the most of any off-Broadway production in the past year!
But I promised many of you that all the excitement of 07-08 so far is nothing compared to what’s coming up: Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire.
9 Parts of Desire is a theatrical snapshot of the women who make up an age-old war zone, all of them performed by a single actress. I want to share it with you because it’s politically surprising, emotionally engaging, heartfelt and lyrical and brutal and beautiful all at once. You and your friends will be talking about Heather’s performance for seasons to come. I absolutely believe this is the best performance you’ll see in Chicago all year.
Many of you have asked me why we’re producing the piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Chicago. You know, Heather and her director, Joanna Settle, have been touring this work internationally since 2003 in theaters as large as the Goodman, for audiences in major urban areas from London to New York to Los Angeles. As Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune recently noted, our space at Noyes is woefully inadequate for our artistic ambitions. And though we work miracles in that theater on a regular basis, we couldn’t do it with this one. When you see the set soaring into the flies of the MCA, you’ll understand why.
And hopefully, the visibility that this partnership with the MCA brings us means larger audiences, some of whom will come up to Evanston. Between the greater visibility and the greater audiences, we grow stronger at home, and that’s very important. Stepping up will be hard for us, but if we’re successful, it will show all our supporters throughout Chicagoland just how ambitious we are, and that we’re ready to go to the next level.
But – and here’s where I need your help – with 300 seats to fill each performance and only 3 weeks to do it, I need your help to fill the house! Please, please, please… come early in the run, and call your friends the minute you get home. We’ve got to show the world we can pack ‘em in downtown.
I am looking forward to 9 Parts with more excitement than any show we’ve done this year. Let me know what you think about it at Jason@nexttheatre.org.
All the best,
Jason Loewith
Artistic Director