GableStage offers provocative lineup

Last hurrah at Biltmore

By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com

Published Monday, August 13, 2001

For his final season at the Biltmore Hotel, GableStage's Joseph Adler is giving his audiences more of the provocative, edgy fare that has made his company South Florida's biggest critical success story of the past few years.

Adler, the theater's producing artistic director, has chosen a play about stalking, one about prison life, another about racism, the latest from multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning Edward Albee and a comedy about the high-stress world of television commercials and a chamber musical for his 2001-2002 lineup. All the shows are South Florida premieres.

Rebecca Gilman's Boy Gets Girl, a disturbing Off-Broadway hit about a man whose attentions change from welcome to frightening, begins the season Oct. 20-Nov. 18. The Richard Nelson-Shaun Davey musical based on James Joyce's short story The Dead, about a Christmas party in Dublin, runs Dec. 15-Jan. 13.

Albee's The Play About the Baby, a vaudeville-influenced allegory about the painful loss of innocence, runs Feb. 9-March 10. Next is Romulus Linney's powerful A Lesson Before Dying, an adaptation of Ernest Gaines' book about an innocent young black man who is to be hanged in Louisiana in 1948. It will run April 6-May 12.

Stephen Adly Guirgis' much-praised Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, an Off-Broadway hit about inmates at New York's Rikers Island prison, follows May 31-June 30. The season -- and GableStage's tenure at the Biltmore -- concludes July 20-Aug. 18 with Rob Ackerman's Tabletop, a comedy about the filming of a television commercial.

The theater's final season at the Biltmore, a one-year extension granted after the hotel decided it needed to reclaim the company's space for its own uses, will end with the company moving to a larger 250-300-seat space. Adler said he has options in several South Florida cities and expects to make a decision before the start of the 2001-2002 season.

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.