Taper’s Taste for 2000-01 Runs to Eclectic Contemporary

The Mark Taper Forum has announced a 2000-01 season that will feature a wide range of contemporary work.

August Wilson’s latest play, “King Hedley II” (Sept. 14-Oct. 22), will follow in the wake of his first play, “Jitney,” which closed at the Taper last weekend. Part of Wilson’s series of plays set in different decades, “King Hedley II” is set in 1985 in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where “Jitney” took place. The director will be Marion McClinton, who also staged “Jitney” here and the premiere of “King Hedley” in Pittsburgh.

The young British playwright Patrick Marber’s “Closer” (Nov. 9-Dec. 10), about two couples in mid-’90s London, won the 1998 Olivier Award for best London play and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best foreign play. Robert Egan, who staged Marber’s “Dealers’ Choice” at the Taper, will direct.

Warren Leight’s “Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine” (Jan. 25-March 4) may beat the play that made Leight famous, “Side Man,” to L.A., unless the latter is produced here soon. (The “Side Man” producers still hope for a commercial run in L.A.) Like “Side Man,” “Glimmer” is set in the jazz world, telling the story of two brothers who chose different paths. Evan Yionoulis will direct the play, which premiered last summer in Williamstown, Mass.

“Tuva or Bust!” (March 22-May 6, 2001) is the name for Peter Parnell’s previously untitled dramatization of a book of the same name by Ralph Leighton. Originally slated for the Taper’s current season, the project was postponed to allow for further development. Alan Alda still plans to play physicist Richard Feynman, and Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson will direct.

“The Body of Bourne” (May 31-July 15, 2001) will be one of the relatively rare plays that climbs out of the Taper development pipeline and onto the Taper main stage for its first full production. John Belluso’s script is based on the life of essayist, orator and political activist Randolph Bourne, who died in 1918 from the flu epidemic, at age 32. Belluso is acting co-director of the Taper’s Other Voices Project, which promotes work by and about the disabled; Bourne was hunchbacked. Lisa Peterson will direct.

Two solos will alternate performances to fill the final slot (July 21-Sept. 16, 2001). Charlayne Woodard’s “In Real Life,” about the early professional career of the actress whose previous autobiographical monologues “Pretty Fire” and “Neat” have won much acclaim, was commissioned by the Taper and Seattle Repertory Theatre, where it will premiere. In Marc Wolf’s “Another American: Asking and Telling,” the author portrays 12 characters grappling with the issue of gays in the military. Wolf’s work, seen last year in New York, is based on interviews with more than 150 people.

Besides the regular season slots, the Taper has invited Cornerstone Theater to present Alison Carey’s “For Here or to Go?” as a holiday bonus, Dec. 15-24. The cast will include members of all 14 communities with which Cornerstone has worked since the previously itinerant troupe settled in L.A. in 1992.