FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 19, 2024
CONTACT: Lizzi Albert
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: 240-505-6250
Perisphere Theater Announces 2025 Season, Partnership with the Writer’s Center
Silver Spring, Maryland (March 19, 2024): Montgomery County-based Perisphere Theater announced that the first season under its new leadership will feature two area premieres: The America Play, by Suzan-Lori Parks, and Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh, by Joel Gross.
Incoming co-artistic director Gerrad Alex Taylor will direct The America Play, by Suzan-Lori Parks, with performances from January 31-February 15, 2025. Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Topdog/Underdog in 2002, and Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2023. The America Play centers around an African-American gravedigger and Abraham Lincoln impersonator and his estranged family. Parks found one of her early career successes in this play that explores the way Blackness is represented and erased in mainstream narratives of United States History.
Co-artistic director Lizzi Albert will direct Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh, by Joel Gross, which will run June 6-21, 2025. The Color of Flesh imagines a love triangle on the eve of the French Revolution between Marie Antoinette; Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, the beautiful, ambitious portrait painter who made her image famous; and the fictional Count Alexis de Ligne, whose enthusiastic embrace of revolutionary ideas spell disaster for the doomed Queen.
Both productions will perform in the Allan Lefcowitz Theater at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, where Perisphere will be in residence for the 2025 season. Perisphere announced this past Friday that they are entering into an agreement with The Writer’s Center to manage their theater space and deepen TWC’s roots in the theater community. “The Writer’s Center is truly excited about this collaboration,” said Margaret Meleney, TWC’s Executive Director. “We look forward to building a home for Perisphere in Bethesda and working with the outstanding team at The Writer’s Center to advance the arts in Montgomery County,” said Albert.
About Perisphere Theater: Founded in 2015 by Heather Benjamin, Perisphere Theater produces plays that examine personal and collective history and the notion of history itself. We strive for a theater experience that gives audiences a greater appreciation of history and of those who are often left out of its retelling. In 2023, the Washington Post included Perisphere on its list of small companies worth bookmarking as a “thought-provoking company.”
For additional information, visit Perisphere’s website. Hear Gerrad and Lizzi’s interview with Dex Kinsman’s Theater District podcast here.