Playhouse on Park’s 2022-23 season includes Pulitzer Prize winner ‘Fences,’ Paula Vogel’s ‘Indecent’ and more

Playhouse on Park announced its 2022-23 season Sunday night at a party at the theater on Park Road in West Hartford.

The company has been around for over a decade, and its programming has settled into a nice groove: dramas set in Jewish or African-American communities, a small cast show with literary overtones and a Christmas comedy.

Several of the shows in the next season had their world premieres in Connecticut, including works by August Wilson, Paula Vogel and Douglas Lyons.

The 2022-23 season will open with “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” Sept. 28 through Oct. 16. Set in 1959, Lanie Robertson’s music-filled dramatization of the last days of the tormented jazz singer Billie Holiday has been steadily popular in Connecticut for decades. The play shows Holiday performing such standards as “Strange Fruit,” “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Don’t Explain” and “God Bless the Child.”

August Wilson’s “Fences,” is scheduled from Nov. 2-20. The play is set in Pittsburgh in the 1950s but has a mighty Connecticut legacy. The 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner remains the best known of Wilson’s Century Cycle. The play had its first reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven and has been done at Hartford Stage and the Long Wharf Theatre.

The first of two “Theater for Young Audiences” shows is “A Charles Dickens Christmas,” Dec. 10-30, a book by Robert Owens Scott, music by Douglas J. Cohen and lyrics by Tome Toce.

Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,” set for Jan. 25-Feb. 26, 2023, has roots at Yale. The play began in 2000 as “The People vs. The God of Vengeance,” a thesis project for Rebecca Taichman when she was a student at the Yale (now Geffen) School of Drama. A decade and a half later, commissioned by the Yale Rep and working with Taichman, acclaimed playwright Paula Vogel wrote a new script based on the same historical material about how a play in Yiddish was charged with “unlawfully advertising, giving, presenting and participating in an obscene, indecent, immoral and impure drama or play” when it was produced on Broadway in 1923. The Rep’s production moved to off Broadway in 2016 and to Broadway in 2017. Vogel’s script shows aspects of the story left out of history books, and charts the play’s legacy in the aftermath of the trial.

Next year’s show by stop/time dance theater — Playhouse on Park’s resident dance company — will be “Stop Time Dance Machine,” March 22-April 2, 2023.

The second “Theater for Young Audiences” show will take place April 19-May 7, 2023. It is an adaptation of Don Freeman’s children’s book “Dandelion,” about a socially awkward lion, with book and lyrics by Joan Ross Sorkin and music by Mary Liz McNamara.

From May 31-June 18, 2023, Playhouse on Park presents another world premiere, of “Webster’s Bitch” by New York playwright Jacqueline Bircher. The playhouse held a reading of the script in November 2021 and describes the plot as: “When their editor-in-chief gets caught using some unexpected profanity, the employees of Webster’s Dictionary find themselves at the center of an internet uprising over gender and obscenity in the age of social media.”

The season will end with the musical “Bandstand,” July 12-Aug. 20, 2023. Set shortly after the end of World War II, “Bandstand” follows a group of veterans who start a swing band in hopes of winning a national competition. The show, created by Richard Oberacker, was on Broadway in 2017. Its national tour was confounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to the eight shows at its 244 Park Road space, Playhouse on Park is also starting a new “Literature Alive: On the Road!” touring series, kicking off in March 2023 with “Polkadots: The Cool Kids Musical.” “Polkadots,” a fantasy story about community acceptance inspired by segregation in U.S. schools in the mid-20th century, was conceived and co-written by New Haven native and Hartt School grad Douglas Lyons, whose “Chicken and Biscuits” was on Broadway last year. Playhouse on Park previously staged “Polkadots” in 2018. The show was originally workshopped in Connecticut at the Ivoryton Playhouse in 2016.

Playhouse on Park subscribers can currently renew their existing subscriptions, while new subscriptions go on sale June 1 and single tickets go on sale July 1.

Playhouse on Park is at 244 Park Road, West Hartford. More information on the 2022-23 season is at playhouseonpark.org.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.