Striking coal miners and their gay supporters, a burlesque performer who is safer playing gay than being gay, lesbian couples with procreation issues, gender and astral fluidity amid the ponderosa pines, the mother of an early AIDS victim looking for answers, a starving actor feeding Barbra Streisand's ego, and a 1960s musical given a gay makeover are among the matters that New Conservatory Theatre Center will be addressing in its 2015-16 season. The eight-play series, recently announced by Ed Decker, artistic director of the LGBTQI-billed theater, also includes a third annual holiday production of "Avenue Q."
The season opens in September with Michael Kerrigan's "For the Love of Comrades," the U.S. premiere of a play titled "Pits and Perverts" when it debuted in Northern Ireland in 2013. The time is 1984, when gay activists rallied behind striking miners in an epic showdown with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's draconian labor policies. A tabloid newspaper came up with a pits/perverts headline, a moniker adopted by the unlikely alliance itself. The 2014 movie Pride is also based on the 1984 events.
"The Nance," opening in October, is set during the waning days of burlesque in 1930s New York. The play takes its title from a stock burlesque character, a stereotypically effeminate man played by a presumably straight performer. But in Douglas Carter Beane's story, the stage nance is also an indiscreet gay man whose personal and professional travails alternate with scenes from the burlesque show itself. Nathan Lane was the highly praised star of the 2013 Lincoln Center production on Broadway. NCTC will be offering the play's regional premiere.
To begat or not to begat, that is the subject upsetting the balance between two lesbian couples in "The Kid Thing." Opening in November, Sarah Gubbins' comedy-drama starts off with casual dinner-party banter when one couple surprises the other with the news of a coming child. The second couple has never discussed having kids, but the newly introduced topic sends them into soul-searching arguments. Gubbins' play had its debut in Chicago in 2011.
December brings NCTC's third visit to "Avenue Q," the "Sesame Street" sort of neighborhood where puppets and people deal with grownup issues. While the musical may seem on its way to becoming the theater's "Nutcracker," the upcoming production is billed as the "furwell tour."
A world premiere will help usher in 2016, as "Sagittarius Ponderosa" explores the fluidity of gender, the signposts of the stars, and secrets held by the giant pines. The central character is named Archer, but when he returns to Oregon to care for his dying father, the family insists on remembering him as Angela. Transgender playwright MJ Kaufman, who developed the play at Yale School of Drama, said it emerged from her frustration "that most queer narratives are coming-out stories, and most transgender narratives are transition stories. I wanted to create art that would acknowledge constant change as an intrinsic part of being a person."
Terrence McNally is perhaps the most produced playwright at NCTC. His newest play, "Mothers and Sons," arrives in March and follows such other NCTC productions as "The Ritz," "The Lisbon Traviata," and "Master Class." In "Mothers and Sons," seen on Broadway last year, McNally created a sequel of sorts to his 1990 television movie "Andre's Mother." The play takes up 20 years after Katherine has buried her son and snubbed his lover, and now she has decided some sort of peace must be made with her son's memory and the man who once loved him.
Another March opening is Jonathan Tolins' "Buyer and Cellar," an off-Broadway hit in 2013 that played San Francisco last year in a tour that starred original actor Michael Urie. NCTC has already lined up J. Conrad Frank, sometimes known as Katya Smirnoff-Skyy, to play an out-of-work actor who gets a job tending to an actual little village of shops that Barbra Streisand has created to showcase her collectibles. It's a one-person show in which Frank will play both the eager-to-please actor and the harder-to-please superstar.
The season will conclude with the May opening of "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever." But this is not quite the 1965 Broadway musical that starred Barbara Harris, or the film version that starred Streisand a few years later. In reworking the original libretto about a psychiatrist and his psychically gifted patient, the neurotic woman has been turned into a gay man. In a past life, the patient was a girl singer in a 1940s big band, and the doctor falls in love with her as their therapy sessions bring her incarnation forward. With contemporary scenes moved to the go-go psychedelia of the 1970s, songs from other Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane projects have been interpolated into the original score. The "revisical" had a brief Broadway run in 2011.
Season tickets to the eight-show series, as well as a seven-show option without "Avenue Q," are now on sale. A four-show sampling of any four shows is also on sale, and with the coming season, NCTC will be introducing a limited number of pay-what-you-can tickets for each preview performance. Single tickets go on sale June 1. Call (415) 861-8972 or go to nctcsf.org.