The Lantern Announces 2012/13 Season to Include NEW JERUSALEM, HENRY V, HEROES

Now in the midst of a record-breaking year, Lantern Theater Company announces the productions scheduled for its 2012/13 season. The Lantern opens its 19th season with a remount of David Ives' New Jerusalem, The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656, the best-selling play in the company's history and featuring the original cast and creative team from the original 2011 production. This limited return engagement is followed by the Philadelphia premiere of The Liar, also by Ives, a sophisticated comedy of lies and love adapted from the French play by Pierre Corneille. Mid-season, the Lantern completes Martin McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy (A Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West) with the darkly comic The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Lantern Associate Artistic Director Kathryn MacMillan will direct both The Liar and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. In the spring, Lantern Artistic Director Charles McMahon directs Henry V, William Shakespeare's epic journey through royal courts and battlefields. The season concludes with Heroes, a playful, bawdy, and heartbreakingly funny comedy by Tom Stoppard, adapted from Gerald Sibleyras' Le Vent De Peupliers and directed by Lantern affiliated artist M. Craig Getting.

"Lantern Theater Company is pleased to present this new season of plays, rife with all the elegant and comprehensive absurdity that humanity can offer – plays that illustrate the full, diverse, and engaging range of human experience," says Charles McMahon. "Without human folly there could be no drama. Storytelling would be unnecessary and history would cease to be instructive. Luckily for us, we live in an era of staggering, titanic foolishness. The folly of youth is never more hilariously depicted than in The Liar. Henry V gives us a searing and stirring look at the folly of empire. The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Heroes immerse us in the bittersweet folly of middle and old age. And we will revisit the folly of genius with our remounting of last year's record-breaking smash hit New Jerusalem."

Lantern Theater Company is located at St. Stephen's Theater at 10^th and Ludlow Streets in Center City Philadelphia.  For more information, visit www.lanterntheater.org or call (215) 829-0395.  4-Play Subscriptions and Flex Packages are now available for $72 - $136, with discounts available for students, seniors and groups of 10 or more.  Single tickets go on sale in August 2012. New Jerusalem is not part of the 4-Play Subscription Series, but Lantern subscribers will receive an exclusive 10-25% discount on all tickets. 

Lantern Theater Company's 2012/13 Mainstage Season

New Jerusalem, The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656

September 4 - 23, 2012 (Press Opening: Wed, Sept. 5, 2012, 7 p.m.)

LIMITED RETURN ENGAGEMENT
By David Ives
Directed by Charles McMahon 

As the Inquisition bears down on them, a small Jewish community flees Portugal to find a tenuous peace in seemingly liberal Amsterdam.  But Spinoza, a favorite son of the community and the rabbi's heir apparent, is a revolutionary thinker.  When the boldness of his ideas strains the bounds of Amsterdam's professed tolerance, it leads to a dangerous confrontation between powerful political forces and his own beloved community.  Based on true events in the life of one of the greatest philosophers in history, David Ives' engaging drama challenges traditional political and religious thinking with conviction, passion, and wit.  The cast includes Sam Henderson as Baruch de Spinoza and David Bardeen as Rabbi Mortera, with David Blatt, Jake Blouch, Seth Reichgott, Kittson O'Neill, and Mary Tuomanen.