Explore more of our 2024/25 Season
State Fair season is hear marking the end of the summer here in Minnesota. And as summer becomes fall, we are quickly approaching the start of our 2024/25 Season!
We have been working hard this summer preparing our venue to welcome all of you back through our doors with beautiful new mural, an exciting variety of season shows/readings, and new subscription passes to make our theater more accessible to audiences.
Until then, dive deeper into our season and shows/readings in this blog post and grab your FlexPass Subscription to get your tickets before they go on sale.
LEFTOVERS
Did you know that our 2024/25 Season kicks off Monday, September 16th with our Greenhouse Play Reading series and 2 nights of LEFTOVERS by Josh Wilder? We are excited to welcome Ansa Akyea (BARS AND MEASURES) back to our Jungle stage as director of this fantastical "urban fairy tale!"
"Old-school fairy tales have traditionally not shied away from the hard truths of life (if anything, they served to illustrate and underscore harsh realities), and blending magic with issues of socio-economic status seems a tricky business in any case. But Wilder succeeds: He creates a true and touching story from these seemingly disparate elements and, in the process, he proves himself an emerging playwright to watch."
- WBUR, bit.ly/wbur_JoshWilder
Like previous seasons of our reading series, tickets will be available for all community members at no cost, with LEFTOVERS tickets already on sale now! NEW THIS SEASON, love our Play Reading Series and want to support all four of our readings while reserving your seat early? You can purchase a Greenhouse Play Reading Package for only $40 (only $10 per show)!
VEAL
The season continues with with more from the Greenhouse Play Reading Series and October's reading of VEAL by Jojo Jones, directed by Joy Dolo!
ABOUT THE PLAY: Following a violent coup, a young woman named Chelsea becomes Queen of North America. When 3 friends from her past come asking for a big favor, Chelsea makes them revisit their friendship—and its terrible end.
VEAL was featured on the Playwrights' Center Venturous List (https://pwcenter.org/venturous-list) with the script being described as "a deceptive little monster of a post-apocalyptic play that explores the intersocial dynamics of middle school girls and the long-lasting ramifications of those relationships. It's a bold play about power and shame and history and gender and somehow even sexuality (while not being overtly sexual at all). It's a remarkably confident play by a young writer who is unafraid to tell exactly the story she wants told on terms exactly her own. It's funny. It's terrifying. It's wonderful,” (Kristoffer Diaz).
SEASON FUN FACT: The show art was actually featured in last year's design. A collection of cat photography from 1911 decorated our theater's walls to help immerse our theater-goers in Miss Sophie's world.
DINNER FOR ONE
"What do you get when you take a nearly 100 year old 12-minute comedy sketch, add the precision of physical comedy, the virtuosity of live music, the spontaneity of improvisation and shower it with reverence (and a big dollop of irreverence)? The return of DINNER FOR ONE to the Jungle!
DINNER FOR ONE brings its funny, heartfelt, silly and sublime recipe for holiday warmth back to the Jungle. Reveling in the ways that two people know each other (sometimes too well), love each other (sometimes too much), and celebrate living (sometimes not enough) — DINNER FOR ONE cordially invites you and yours to be a part of the celebration."
Director and co-creator Christina Baldwin is so excited to welcome back what quickly became a Minnesota holiday favorite as part of the Jungle's 2024/25 Season; AND after a sold-out run last season, we are offering MORE hilarious antics and heartwarming moments with 5 WEEKS of DINNER FOR ONE this holiday season.
If you missed the show last year or want to be a part of the magic again, be sure to join the Jungle for DINNER FOR ONE, Co-Created By Christina Baldwin, Sun Mee Chomet, Jim Lichtscheidl, Music Direction by Emilia Mettenbrink.
THE EFFECT
"The opening line of the THE EFFECT -- 'Have you ever suffered from depression?' -- is posed by Lorna, a doctor, to Connie, a patient, as a routine intake question at the start of a clinical drug trial for a new antidepressant. In response, Connie struggles to determine the definition of depression and if the sadness she experiences is regular human sadness or if it is something diagnosable and something to medicate. The doctor asks a question that seems simple, clinical, yes-or-no, but it opens the play with an air of skepticism about the practice of categorizing and quantifying something as vast and omnipresent as sadness.
The doctors running the antidepressant drug trial are working towards understanding the human brain and its complexities, hopefully making a profit while doing so. In their pursuit, they and their test subjects soon come up against another enigmatic emotion: love. What is it, really, and how can I know I am feeling it? If I can understand it, am I able to control it?
What is most exciting to me about this play is that the big questions THE EFFECT presents are not just philosophical ones, they are life-and-death for the characters. For reasons that unfurl throughout the play, they are desperate to comprehend their own emotions so that they can save themselves – spiritually and physically. This creates a high-stakes and compelling experience that throws out a fascinating question that you’ll ponder after the show is over. You will be too engrossed in the captivating story and characters to muse during it.
I am so happy to be directing THE EFFECT this season at the Jungle. The play offers so many delights for the audience, probably because it was written by Lucy Prebble, whose smart, dark, and deeply empathetic writing you might be familiar with from the tv show SUCCESSION or the play ENRON. THE EFFECT is about love and neuroscience and features loveable though highly fallible characters. We are just beginning our work on this intoxicating play and we are looking forward to sharing it with you in March 2025."
Alison Ruth
Associate Director, Artistic Programming & Development and Director of THE EFFECT
If you want to continue to explore the world and writing of Lucy Prebble, be sure to read The New Yorker's 'Lucy Prebble’s Dramas of High Anxiety' which explores her works “The Effect” as well as TV shows “I Hate Suzie” & “Succession.”
SEASON FUN FACT: If you have read through our Jungle playbills or blog posts you have probably read one of Alison's insightful retrospectives. Coming to the Jungle Theater in 2019 with a background in dramaturgy, Alison has offered her observant viewpoint and thoughtful words to many of the Jungle's educational and artistic write-ups. We are so excited to welcome her Jungle directorial debut!
Kate Douglas headshot by Stephanie Crousillat
TULIPA
Part of our Greenhouse Play Reading Series, Kate Douglas' TULIPA tells a riches to rags story of self-discovery set against the backdrop of 'Tulipmania:' a brief period in the 17th century when the tulip, being recently introduced to Holland, became a luxury item, with prices for the bulbs reaching extraordinarily high levels and the visually spectacular 'broken' variants being the most desirable.
Individuals sold their businesses, family houses, farm animals, and dowries in order to buy bulbs that they had never even seen, hoping to join the booming market. However as supply increased and the price of tulips plummeted, the “Tulip Crash” of 1637 sent many of these individuals into bankruptcy.
All because of the tulip.
WORK HARD HAVE FUN MAKE HISTORY
Next summer, our season will conclude with WORK HARD HAVE FUN MAKE HISTORY by reid tang next July; a dark comedic script, with equally as hilarious stage directions, that is not about Amazon, not about Jeff Bezos and certainly not about Elon Musk.
FROM THE AUTHORS NOTE:
"WORK HARD HAVE FUN MAKE HISTORY is a fragmented collection of forced everyday speech between strangers, of polite chatter, of routine transactional conversation...future children calling into the past, prophets calling about the future, and Jeff and Elon, the last survivors of a great disaster on Earth."
BONUS: 'Vessels of Stories'
Christina Vang and Ka Oskar Ly's vision for our new Jungle Mural served as inspiration for our season brochure! Our Jungle staff was especially drawn to the vibrant colors/shapes of the vessels/ plants and got permission from the artists to work it into the design of our season art.