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1986-1987 Season

1986-1987

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
by August Wilson
Directed by Lloyd Richards
Sept. 27 — Oct. 19, 1986
The Huntington Theatre

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone marked the first occasion of August Wilson’s landmark collaborative history at the Huntington. Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, the play examines African Americans’ search for their cultural identity following the repression of American slavery. For Herald Loomis, this search involves the physical migration from the South to Pittsburgh in an attempt to find his wife. Pittsburgh was one of the many urban areas in the North that other blacks migrated to in the 1910s in an effort to flee the discrimination they faced in the South, while attempting to find financial success in the North. Herald’s search for his identity, represented as his song, is unsuccessful until he has embraced the pain of both his own past and the past of his ancestors and moved on to self-sufficiency

Heartbreak House
by George Bernard Shaw
Directed by Edward Gilbert
Nov. 29 — Dec. 21, 1986
The Huntington Theatre

George Bernard Shaw’s delightful comedy about a collection of eccentrics gathered together in a country house built like a ship is also a parable of the beginning of a terrible war and a rueful elegy for the passing of an era. A rich, poignant masterpiece filled with Shaw’s characteristic humor and insight — another triumph of theatre by the author of Saint Joan.

Awake and Sing
by Clifford Odets
Directed by Ben Levit
Jan. 10 — Feb. 1, 1987
The Huntington Theatre

Three generations of a tempestuous family find their ideals severely tested as they battle to adapt to the social and economic tribulations of the 1930s in this American masterpiece. Odets’ greatest play has become an enduring classic of lyrical realism with its superbly faithful characterizations, deeply touching portrayal of love and sacrifice, and unique vernacular eloquence.

Jumpers
by Tom Stoppard
Directed by Jacques Cartier
March 7 — March 29, 1987
The Huntington Theatre

A professor of moral philosophy, ignoring revels and crises all around him, prepares for a debate on the topic: “Man: Good, Bad, or Indifferent.” His beautiful wife Dotty searches for romance as the first British astronauts to land on the moon make it just another place to walk. Physical and intellectual acrobatics are combined with a lost rabbit, a police investigation of murder, and the logical proof of God in a typically brilliant, freewheeling comedy by the author of Night and Day and The Real Thing.

The Diary of a Scoundrel
by Alexander Ostrovsky
Directed by Larry Carpenter
May 23 — June 14, 1987
The Huntington Theatre

A wickedly clever fortune hunter with an uncanny instinct for recognizing human weaknesses sets out to outwit everyone he knows with a rare strategy based on their own hypocrisy and deceit in this hilarious nineteenth-century Russian farce. Even the discovery of the avid commentary he has penned in his private journal proves only a temporary setback for a delightfully shameless schemer.