A Foreign Emphasis in LATC’s New Season

Los Angeles Theatre Center plans a season of brand-new plays with an international flavor for the first half of 1990. Four of the five world premieres announced Monday by the theater are set entirely or largely outside the United States.

The season will kick off with the theater’s annual Festival of Premieres, featuring Anna Deavere Smith’s “Piano” (Feb. 3-March 11), Eduardo Machado’s “Stevie Wants to Play the Blues” (Feb. 17-April 8) and Lisette Lecat Ross’ “Dark Sun” (March 10-April 29).

“Piano” focuses on a small girl from an upper-class family during the Cuban revolution. To be directed by the theater’s artistic producing director Bill Bushnell, it was developed in the center’s Women’s Project and given a workshop production at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco earlier this year.

Jonelle Allen and Amy Madigan will appear in Machado’s “Stevie,” which was commissioned by the theater and inspired by a true story about a jazz musician’s double life. Simon Callow, who was acclaimed for his staging of “Jacques and His Master” at the center in 1987, will direct.

“Dark Sun” was written by a South African and is set in a Soweto ghetto during a riot. The leading characters are a black man and a white woman. Rosemary Hays will direct.

The first opening after the festival will be “The Rule of Threes” (April 6-May 27) by Minnesota playwright Jeffrey Hatcher. It’s billed as three related one-acts with a farcical tone. The subjects are Eastern European political dissidents, defectors and Americans abroad.

Danny Glover and Carl Lumbly will trade the two leading roles at alternating performances of Derek Walcott’s “Viva Detroit” (May 18-July 8), directed by Claude Purdy. It’s the story of two Caribbean islanders encountering a beautiful American woman, by the author of “The Dream on Monkey Mountain,” a hit at the Mark Taper Forum in 1970.

A sixth play, to be announced later, will complete the season June 9-July 29.