7 Stages, describing itself as “fiercely weird for 40 years,” opens its 2018/19 season in September with Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Waiting for Godot and closes it in May 2019 with a piece titled Human: A Citizen’s Encounter. Look for three world premieres as the season unfolds.
The Little Five Points theater’s six-show season features its usual mix of in-house productions and imports from like-minded performers around the world. Tickets are $25-$28 and shows generally are performed at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday.
7 Stages — led by artistic director Heidi S. Howard and managing director Mack Headrick — has its own space at 1105 Euclid Ave. NE. Tickets HERE or at 404.523.7647. The 40th season lines up like this.
Waiting for Godot
SEPT. 27-OCT. 14. Samuel Beckett’s 1953 tragicomedy features 7 Stages’ co-founder Del Hamilton and Atlanta-based actor Don Finney as sad-sack drifters waiting for a stranger named Godot, roles they’ve played in in previous Godots at 7 Stages.
Godot, first performed in France, has had four Broadway productions — in 1956, 1957, 2009 and most recently in 2013 with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the key roles of Estragon and Vladimir. Arts journalist David Smith, writing in London’s The Guardian, said: “Waiting for Godot seems to have a unique resonance during times of social and political crisis.” He called it “a modernist existential meditation.”
That seems to dovetail with 7 Stages’ intent. In a statement, the company said it chose to do the “introspective” piece “as our society continues to wait for solutions that may never arrive.” Artistic director Heidi S. Howard directs.
The Way at Midnight
NOV. 1-4. By New Orleans’ Mondo Bizarro, a 14-year-old company that creates interdisciplinary art and partnerships around the world, explores confrontation from America’s Colonial period through the Digital Age with performances, a visual installation, and live and recorded music. Mondo Bizarro co-artistic director Joanna Russo directs.
Curious Holiday Encounters
DEC. 6-9. 7 Stages’ popular festival of interactive performances fills the building with twisty holiday cheer. Featuring the Little Five Points Rockstar Orchestra, Atlanta’s Celtic-themed Arís Theatre, the Weird Sisters Theatre Project and Atlanta theater artist Rebekah Suellau, among others.
Warped
FEB. 21-24, 2019. A world premiere by Paper Doll Militia, a collection of artists from Ireland and Los Angeles. The theatrical aerial-dance spectacle features four quirky characters traversing a world of suspended gears, cranks, levers and ropes that turn like the inner mechanisms of a giant clock. Warped, described as “visually rich, sometimes eerie and always existentially engaging,” asks: What choices determine what reality we land in?
Angry Fags
MARCH 28-APRIL 14, 2019. World premiere. 7 Stages introduced this drama to the world in 2013, but playwright Topher Payne has updated his script for the Trump era. Angry Fags is an uncompromising Oscar Wilde-meets-Fight Club fantasia about how good ideas go bad, the destructiveness of toxic masculinity and how no one is really afraid of gay guys.
Human: A Citizen’s Encounter
MAY 18, 2019. A world premiere curated and directed by Heidi S. Howard. It features storytellers (homeless, refugee, political, science) who work with professional artists to tell documentary-theater-style tales about family, ritual and courage in all corners of the city.
