P.J. Paparelli puts American Theater’s money where his mouth is

Last week when Kris Vire wrote about American Theater Company’s incoming artistic director P.J. Paparelli, most recently of Perseverance, Alaska, I was interested in the new guy’s claims that he was going to take that company in a different direction.

But when the company announced its next season yesterday, my jaw almost hit the floor. New direction is one thing; for a mid-level company like ATC, Paparelli’s plan is more like a new frontier. The 24 year-old company has often targeted a middle-class audience and favored the works of recognizable playwrights. Although they’ve taken risks in recent years, the group’s big hits have come from writers like Tennessee Williams, William Inge and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

But next year the company will mount the questionably titled Yeast Nation: The Triumph of Life, which is the newest musical project from diabolical Urinetown creators Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann. This makes ATC the first company to mount a new work by those Chicago-trained artists since they won Tonys for their gleefully perverted pee musical.

Also on the docket is the Tectonic Theater Project’s The People’s Temple, a documentary about the Jonestown massacre/suicides, as well as a rotating repertory of Sam Shepherd’s True West and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog. Congo Square is co-producing. (That pairing of plays is kind of a brilliant move, as both are brutal dramas about brothers sparring over American mythology. What’s more, True West, which arguably put Steppenwolf and Chicago theater on the national map, is the ultimate angry white guy play. Topdog, on the other hand, is specifically about the African-American experience. The contrast should be illuminating.)

Meanwhile, the previously scheduled revival of the 1946 Broadway comedy Born Yesterday has been yanked from the schedule and replaced with Stephen Karam’s high-school comedy Speech and Debate, which premiered last year at New York Theater Workshop, and will, by necessity, feature young actors.

A play by Eduardo Machado is also under consideration, one which would require Latino actors. This means Paparelli, in his first season managing a long-standing ensemble of mostly white, middle-aged artists, is unafraid to program a season outside their needs, and that they’re willing to let him.

Also, for its 24th season, the company is offering $24 season tickets to the first 100 subscribers. Frankly, that's crazy talk considering a single ticket to the Goodman’s Shining City can cost as much as $70.

You can tell Paparellli’s new in town. He doesn’t seem to understand how it’s done. And if you’re even remotely bored with the city’s current mainstream offerings, that’s a very, very good thing.