The MET announces ambitious 2015-16 season

Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre has announced a 2015-16 season that includes classic American plays, a speculative drama about Vincent Van Gogh and two major musicals to be performed in repertory.

The first fall production will be “Stones in His Pockets” by Marie Jones, although it is not part of the regular season. The play is a tragicomedy that depicts Hollywood filmmakers shooting in Ireland and hiring locals as extras to bolster the movie’s “authenticity.” The play, which has not been produced professionally in Kansas City, calls for only two actors, who between them play dozens of characters.

Just where the six-show regular season will be staged is unclear because artistic director Karen Paisley is seeking a new home in midtown. The theater company has operated since 2008 in an old strip mall at 3614 Main St.

Paisley has said the building’s physical problems, including chronic roof leaks, have forced her to look for a new home. Last winter the administrative office became unusable after a ceiling collapsed.

On the opening night of “The Full Monty,” Paisley told the audience that she hoped to move to the historic Warwick Theatre and that lease negotiations were underway. The Warwick is on Main Street between 39th Street and Westport Road. “The Full Monty,” by the way, runs through Sunday.

Specific dates have not yet been assigned to any of the shows in the 2015-16 season. Here’s the lineup, which is subject to change.

▪ “The Skin of Our Teeth” by Thornton Wilder. The winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize isn’t produced as often as his classic “Our Town,” but this three-act allegory about the history of the human race has been a favorite of high-school and college theaters for decades.

The original Broadway production had a cast of 31. Clearly, this will be another opportunity for Paisley to fill the stage with masses of people.

The show is expected to run in November.

▪ In January and February 2016, the MET will stage two big musicals in rotating rep: “Man of La Mancha,” a 1965 show based on “Don Quixote” by Cervantes that became a Broadway hit, and “Parade,” which was staged in 1998 at Lincoln Center.

Mitch Leigh wrote the music for “Man of La Mancha,” Dale Wasserman wrote the book, and Joe Darion penned the lyrics. The original production won five Tony Awards. The money tune is, of course, “The Impossible Dream.”

“Parade,” by composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown and playwright Albert Uhry, dramatizes the case of Leo Frank, the Jewish manager of an Atlanta pencil factory who in 1913 was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee.

The case was tried in an atmosphere of intense anti-Semitism. The governor of Georgia commuted Frank’s death sentence, after which a mob stormed the prison farm where he was held and lynched him.

This respected musical ran less than three months at Lincoln Center, although it won Tony Awards for best book of a musical and best score.

▪ “The Tall Girls,” by Meg Miroshnik, depicts a women’s basketball team in the Depression-era Midwest. A reviewer in Atlanta, where the play received its world premiere in 2014 at the Alliance Theatre, praised it for being “out of the ordinary, in a genre unique unto itself, and thoroughly entertaining.”

The show is slated for March 2016. This will be the play’s first Kansas City production.

▪ “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail,” by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, is the second-most produced play by the authors of the classic “Inherit the Wind.”

First produced professionally in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War, the play was staged widely on college campuses. Its depiction of young Henry David Thoreau spending a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax — which he argued would help finance the Mexican-American War — found sympathetic audiences in an era of civil disobedience.

It is likely to run in April 2016.

▪ “Vincent at Brixton,” by Nicholas Wright, will probably run in May 2016. Wright’s 2002 play, first produced in London, imagines the circumstances during a stay by a young, unknown Vincent Van Gogh at a boarding house in London in 1873. In the play, the young artist develops a burning, unrequited passion for his landlady’s daughter but then finds himself attracted in a different way to her mother.

In movies, Van Gogh has been featured as “the clichéd epitome of the tortured genius. Avoiding all such melodrama, ‘Vincent in Brixton’ shows us that genius in gestation,” wrote Paul Taylor of the Independent.

▪ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” by Tennessee Williams, will close the season. The play is drenched in Southern dysfunction and claimed the 1955 Pulitzer Prize.

Set in a mansion on a cotton plantation, the play depicts the difficult relationship between Big Daddy, the family patriarch; his son Brick and Brick’s wife, Maggie. Williams revised the play in 1974 and in so doing made some significant changes.

This story was originally published June 10, 2015 at 4:00 AM with the headline "The MET announces ambitious 2015-16 season."