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ITHACA, NY: Kitchen Theatre Company (KTC), Downtown Ithaca's regionally acclaimed and nationally recognized year-round professional theatre, announces its 2006-07 / 16th Season. With four performance series - MAIN STAGE, FAMILY FARE, KITCHEN COUNTER CULTURE, KITCHEN SINK - KTC's new season offers an engaging mix of contemporary, regional, and world premiere plays and musicals in an intimate 73-seat theatre that encourages a bold relationship between audience and actor. KTC was recognized by the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce with this year's "Small Business of the Year Award," the first not-for-profit to receive this honor. "Important conversations happen in the Kitchen."

Main Stage
KTC renews its commitment to producing new plays while continuing to reinvestigate great works of the past with a season that includes an American classic, five regional premieres (including one with an Off-Broadway cast fresh from the Edinburgh Theatre Festival), and a world premiere musical. After a stellar 15th Anniversary season that broke all sales records, KTC will offer seven Main Stage plays in an expanded performance schedule: Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30 pm, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm, and Sunday matinees at 4:00 pm. Clean Alternatives and Yellowman will have an additional 8:00 pm final Sunday closing performance.

August 24 - September 17, 2006
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
A masterpiece of American drama and winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, The Glass Menagerie paints a powerful portrait of a family struggling to cope with life's cruel realities. Although Southern belles and gentleman callers may be from a bygone culture, Williams' haunting "memory play" remains a timeless drama of power, tenderness and beauty.
Underwriter: Tompkins Trust Company

October 19 - November 5, 2006
Clean Alternatives by Brian Dykstra regional premiere
Brian Dykstra's signature style crackles in this scathing, tightly-wound comedy about the elusiveness of enlightenment in this dark-age of the almighty dollar. Two corporate hucksters find their match in a small-time, environmentally-friendly family businesswoman in this devilish satire of eco-destructive politics, big business and shady deals. Tables turn and turn again as love, folly, ambition and lots of cash trade hands in a mad rush to save the planet - or a least one corner of it - before it's just too late! [adult content]
Sponsors: Allan Warshawsky/Realtor and CSP Management

November 30 - December 23, 2006
The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones regional premiere
This cutting-edge comedy tackles issues of identity and human connection in the digital age. Jennifer Marcus is a 22-year-old computer prodigy with a scathingly sharp wit, an uncensored mouth, top-level FBI connections and an anxiety disorder that has trapped her in her house. In her quest to find her birth mother, Jennifer must exploit her strengths and confront her limitations to find a unique road to her Chinese birthplace. Rolin Jones' prize-winning play confirms that in a time when the computer keeps shrinking the world, it is still family that truly defines us. [adult content]
Sponsor: CSP Management

January 11 - February 10, 2007
Comfort Food book & lyrics by Rachel Lampert, music by Larry Pressgrove world premiere musical
Can twilight romance burn as brightly as first love? From the playwright and composer team who created Tony & the Soprano and The Angle of the Sun comes a new musical story of dining, dating, dessert and desire.
Underwriter: Audrey Edelman & Associates RealtyUSA; Director Sponsor: Surgical Associates of Ithaca, P.C.

March 22 - April 15, 2007
After Ashley by Gina Gionfriddo regional premiere
A blisteringly funny and deeply poignant story about a teenage boy's life after a family tragedy catapults him into the national spotlight. Heartache and hilarity mix in this collision of grief and growing up amid a national media frenzy. At the center of the storm is Justin, a modern-day Holden Caulfield, who is sure to catch your heart. Gina Gionfriddo has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights. [adult content] Sponsor: Allan Warshawsky/Realtor

April 26 - May 13, 2007
Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith regional premiere
A finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, Yellowman tells the tragic love story of Alma and Eugene, who struggle against the prejudices of color, gender and class that have ensnared generations of their African-American families. In lush, striking language, two actors recreate two volatile families in a fierce coming-of-age story set against the Gullah/Geechee culture in the Sea Islands off South Carolina. [adult content]
Sponsors: CSP Management and Cornell University

June 21 - July 22, 2007
A Marriage Minuet by David Wiltse regional premiere
Let's misbehave! A madcap satire of temptation and marital infidelities that combines the savoir faire of Noel Coward with Edward Albee's sharp eye for midlife foibles, this deliriously naughty comedy will leave you gasping for breath as two academic couples navigate that daring dance beyond matrimony. [adult content]
Sponsors: Foster Custom Kitchens and Emerson Power Transmission

Kitchen Counter Culture
This series presents cutting-edge work by writer/performers who are fearless in their convictions and daring in their presentations. This season the Kitchen features five artists of color: African-American, Korean-American, Chinese & Japanese-American, and from Trinidad and Tobago and Peru. While their issues, stories and concerns differ, their honesty and directness are the same. Made possible in part with funding from The New York State Council on the Arts; Series sponsor: Foster Custom Kitchens

September 29, 30, & October 1, 2006
I Reject These Labels written and performed by LeVan D. Hawkins
Half of the duo that brought us the provocative and powerful Black Stuff returns to the Kitchen Theatre. Los Angeles-based poet, performer and playwright Hawkins' work was heralded by the LA Weekly as "a stunning collage of performance, music, video clips, spoken word, and poetry…(that) explodes with the kind of soaring enlightenment that comes from painstakingly peeling away at the multilayered onion of truth."

October 6, 7, 8, 2006
From Inner Worlds to Outer Space written and performed by Dan Kwong
Los Angeles-based performance artist, writer, and visual artist Dan Kwong's work draws upon his life experiences to explore the personal, the historical, the social and the unspeakable. With keen insight and a generous sense of humor, he intertwines storytelling, multimedia, dynamic physical movement, poetry, martial arts and music. From Inner Worlds… is a multimedia program featuring some of his most powerful and compelling pieces.

February 23, 24, 25, 2007
My Mom Across America written and performed by Tina Lee
Tricked by her parents into taking an all-Korean bus tour across Canada, Tina Lee grapples with her Korean-American identity, her mother, motion sickness, and other family baggage. Watch Tina accrue massive karma points as she steers through the prickly terrain of mother-daughter relationships and tries to survive her family vacation from hell. "…a story full of humor and painful misunderstandings." - BBC Radio.

March 2, 3, 4, 2007
Masquerade: Poems of Calypso and Home written and performed by Roger Bonair-Agard
Through poetry and song, with humor and in all seriousness, Masquerade explores the ways in which distance, remembrance, and seventeen years away from home shape a man. It critiques and celebrates the Trinidadian ethos by examining the influence that its seminal music - calypso - exerts on a poet and the larger world. Bonair-Agard has appeared three times on Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam on HBO and has stirred audiences at festivals and concerts from Germany to South Africa to Alaska.

April 16, 17, 18, 2007
Ant

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