Kirk Douglas season includes new musical, show on Rodney King

The new season at the Kirk Douglas Theatre will feature four main productions, including a world-premiere musical and Irish actor Barry McGovern in a piece dedicated to Samuel Beckett.

In addition, the 2013-14 season, announced Thursday by Center Theatre Group, will showcase solo pieces by actor Roger Guenveur Smith about Rodney King plus a new work by Luis Alfaro.

“The Black Suits” (Oct. 27 to Nov. 24) is a new musical written by Joe Iconis and Robert Maddock about four young men growing up on Long Island and the garage band they form. The musical has previously been presented in a workshop version at the Barrington Stage Company in Massachusetts.

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McGovern will present “I’ll Go On” (Jan. 10 to Feb. 9), a one-man show consisting of text pulled from three Beckett novels -- “Molloy,” “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable.” The show has toured internationally since 1985. McGovern appeared at the Mark Taper Forum last year in the revival of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

“Different words for the same thing,” a new play by Kimber Lee, will make its debut next season (May 4 to June 1). The drama focuses on a family living in a small town in Idaho, and how the return of an adopted daughter sets various revelations in motion.

The season’s fourth production will be the return of Second City’s holiday comedy, “A Christmas Carol: Twist Your Dickens!” (Dec. 8 to 29).

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The DouglasPlus sidebar season -- which typically features workshop productions and solo shows -- will offer three productions for the new season, running Sept. 14 to Oct. 6.

“Rodney King,” created and performed by Guenveur Smith, will focus on the man who was beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, inciting the L.A. riots. The actor unveiled his show at the Bootleg Theatre last year.

The other solo shows are “St. Jude” by Alfaro, a piece about his father’s stroke and other family memories; and “Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam” by Trieu Tran, about the writer’s journey from Vietnam to Canada.

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