KCAT announces 2013-2014 Season

Contact: Audrey Porsche
Director of Development & Marketing
Kansas City Actors Theatre
Audrey@kcactors.org
(719) 640-9491

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Kansas City Actors Theatre announces its 2013-2014 Season,
beginning with a summer of American Masterworks.

The summer begins with a celebration of the 100th birthday of our
own William Inge. To commemorate this event, KCAT will offer a
production of one of his most well-loved plays, and one very
appropriate to the season, Picnic.

Picnic is a charming, uplifting and heartbreaking story of one life-
changing day in the lives of two households in a small Kansas town
in the early 1950s. The play centers around the chemistry between
two main characters: Madge Owens, a pretty 18-year-old girl, and
Hal Carter, a young vagabond. Madge is coming of age, and is in
the midst of an existential crisis, wondering if there is more to her
life than being a pretty girl destined to marry the first acceptable
man who asks. Then Hal arrives in town, and his presence has a
seismic effect on Madge as well as the other members of the
Owens' extended family. Hal sees in Madge a chance for an
emotional attachment more deep and real than any in his shiftless
life up to this point. All the characters in the play get caught up in
the resulting whirlwind of passion and longing, making this a
summer picnic like no other.
Next, is a timeless masterwork from the towering talent of Eugene
O'Neill, A Long Day's Journey into Night. A loving semi-
autobiographical homage to O'Neill's family, Long Day's Journey is
a harrowing, unblinking, booze and dope-fueled descent into the
revelation of dark truths and bitter love. It is also a dizzying
display of O'Neill's mastery of powerful dialogue, and an
opportunity for virtuoso performances. An unforgettable theatrical
experience, courtesy of KCAT.

After the summer, with dates and venues to be determined, the
season continues with two more productions.

In our fifth co-production with the Unicorn Theatre, KCAT will
present Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities, which has won the
Drama League Award for Distinguished Play, along with a Tony
Award and a Drama Desk Award.In Other Desert Cities, Brooke
Wyeth returns home to Palm Springs after a six-year absence to
celebrate Christmas with her family. Brooke announces that she is
about to publish a memoir dredging up a pivotal and tragic event
in the family's history--a wound they don't want reopened. In
effect, she draws a line in the sand and dares them all to cross it.

Then, in a co-production with UMKC and the WWI Museum, KCAT
will present R.C. Sherriff's powerful WWI drama, Journey's End. Set
in the trenches at Saint-Quentin, Aisne in 1918 towards the end of
WWI, the play takes you right into the dugout of a British Army
infantry company. It is an "uncompromising, cleareyed play about
war--and not war as it echoes on the home front or in chambers
of government, but war as a daily phonomenon for those who fight
it." (Ben Brantley, New York Times). Filled with finely-drawn
characters, Journey's End brings a starkly human perspective in a
WWI tale that is not to be missed.
KCAT's summer productions will be staged at Union Station's H&R
Block City Stage beginning August 6th and running through
September 15. Season subscriptions go on sale in May at
www.kcactors.org or by calling the Central Ticket Office at
816.235.6222.

Kansas City Actors Theatre is celebrating its ninth season of
producing classic and modern-classic plays featuring Kansas City
theatre artists.

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