Swept Away may be the name of a notoriously bad Madonna and Guy Ritchie film, but it’s also the tag for Centaur’s just-announced 2016/17 season. Given the season is to include a big West End and Broadway hit, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and a multi-META-winning production, any adverse associations are themselves likely to be swept away.
During a press call at the theatre on Wednesday, artistic director Roy Surette revealed that Centaur’s 48th season will kick off on Oct. 4 with Nick Payne’s Constellations. A quantum love story in which a relationship goes through a multiverse of alternate outcomes, it was a surprise hit in London’s West End and Broadway. Peter Hinton, last in Montreal helming the Segal’s acclaimed production of Funny Girl, will direct.
Next up will be The Watershed, another slice of documentary theatre from Annabel Soutar, whose Seeds was a big draw at Centaur, and whose Fredy – about the 2008 police killing of Fredy Villanueva – is currently playing at Théâtre La Licorne. A combination of family road trip and investigation into Canada’s natural resources, The Watershed drops in at Centaur from Nov. 8 to Dec. 4 as part of a national tour.
Stephen Sacks’s Bakersfield Mist (Jan. 31 to Feb. 26) is also an investigation of sorts, being based on the true story of a boozy trailer park woman who may have stumbled upon a priceless Jackson Pollock painting in a thrift store. This play is the first of the season to be directed by Surette himself, and he follows it up, from March 7 to April 2, with the Quebec English-language première of François Archambault’s You Will Remember Me (Tu te souviendras de moi). A comedy drama about a professor suffering from short-term memory loss, it premièred two years ago at La Licorne.
Also originating from La Licorne is Chlorine, the English première of Florence Longpré and Nicolas Michon’s Chlore, an off-beat love story set in rural Quebec. Translated by Johanna Nutter for her company creature/creature, it’s this year’s selection for Centaur’s Brave New Looks slot (Oct. 19 to 29).
One of the highlights of the season is bound to be Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about racial tensions in 1950s and present-day Chicago. A kind of spin-off from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In the Sun, it will be directed by Ellen David, April 4 to 30.
The final main-stage play of the season is Bed and Breakfast (April 25 to May 21), Mark Crawford’s comedy about a gay couple who open a guest house in a tiny tourist town in Ontario. A two-hander in which the actors also play the town’s teeming populace, it’s being co-produced by Thousand Islands Playhouse where it premièred last year.
Beyond the main-stage productions will be the traditional dark Christmas cheer known as Urban Tales (Dec. 8 to 17), and the Wildside Festival (Jan. 5 to 15) which already has one of the shows lined up, Empire of the Son, Tetsuro Shigematsu’s one-man show about his relationship with a father who endured wartime horrors and witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima.
Looking deep into 2017, Centaur will be hosting the much-anticipated remount of Tableau D’Hôte’s production of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna (July 6 to 23), which swept the METAs last year. Eloi ArchamBaudoin and Davide Chiazzese will reprise their roles as the trans heroine and her gone-to-seed biker boyfriend.
Surette might have been speaking of these two characters when he spoke of the season as a whole: “The people in these plays are in many ways familiar and ordinary but they are also extraordinary and surprising and bring us to the brink of new discoveries about ourselves and the world that we live in now.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version on this story incorrectly stated that You Will Remember Me will be making its English-language première here; it has already premièred in English in Toronto. Also, the play made its world première at la Licorne in 2014.
