Geffen Playhouse Announces 2024/2025 Season Lineup
California Theatre is going strong! Geffen Playhouse has announced the six productions that will make up the 2024/2025 season lineup, marking the inaugural season from Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney. The 2024/2025 season will launch August 14th, 2024, in the Geffen’s Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater and continue in the Gil Cates Theater through July 20, 2025. The lineup will feature a mix of classics and new co-productions, as well as Los Angeles, West Coast and world premieres.
The 2024/2025 Geffen Playhouse season will launch with Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size, a raw and heartfelt exploration of the bonds of brotherhood in the Deep South, which also marks the play’s 20th anniversary. The season will continue in the Gil Cates Theater beginning with the Los Angeles premiere of Dragon Lady, written and performed by Broadway star and storyteller Sara Porkalob, who embodies dozens of characters in a trigenerational tour-de-force performance that fuses killer karaoke with laugh-out-loud comedy to tell her family’s incredible origin story.
The next show in the season will be a reimagining of the classic Waiting for Godot, featuring Conor Lovett and Rainn Wilson in Samuel Beckett’s tragi-comedy that has captivated audiences for decades. The season will then continue with slamming doors, flying sardines and dropped trousers in Noises Off.
The season will then be debuting the West Coast premiere of a.k. payne’s Furlough’s Paradise, a poignant tale of grief, home, love and kinship, as two cousins grapple with their conflicting memories of the past and their shared hopes for the future. Poetic and theatrical, Furlough’s Paradise explores family dreams of a utopia yet to be realized. Completing the season will be the world premiere of Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir, the story of a young man who is trying to get his life together, but can’t manage to stay sober and decides to bring his four loveable grandparents on his road to recovery.
“My hope is by beginning the season with The Brothers Size—part of The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy—and Dragon Lady—from multi-hyphenate innovative Broadway star Sara Porkalob’s Dragon Cycle trilogy—we entice our audiences into direct conversations about family, America, and freedom that can expand over multiple theatrical events. It’s a commitment and an invitation to engage,” said Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney. “I also have the great honor of introducing two powerful emerging artists to Los Angeles with their already acclaimed works in a.k. payne’s Furlough’s Paradise and Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir. \
When addressing artistic priorities for the Geffen, McCraney added, “I wanted to deepen the Geffen’s collaborations with theaters across the world. Partnering with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company on Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and working with Gare St Lazare Ireland on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (directed by Gare St Lazare’s Judy Hegarty Lovett and featuring Conor Lovett and Rainn Wilson), felt like bold first steps towards that priority of collaboration.”
