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New plays by Ayad Akhtar, Quiara Alegria Hudes and Joe DiPietro highlight La Jolla Playhouse season

Playwright Ayad Akhtar at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2013. He'll be back in the just-announced 2016-17 season with "JUNK: The Golden Age of Debt," one of four world premieres announced by the Playhouse.

Playwright Ayad Akhtar at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2013. He’ll be back in the just-announced 2016-17 season with “JUNK: The Golden Age of Debt,” one of four world premieres announced by the Playhouse.

(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)
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Four of the six plays in La Jolla Playhouse’s 2016-17 season will be world premieres, including veteran playwright Joe DiPietro diving into the seamy side of movie history with “Hollywood,” a show about the scandal of the never-solved 1922 shooting death of silent film director William Desmond Taylor.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights Quiara Alegria Hudes and Ayad Akhktar also have new plays coming.

For Hudes it’s “Miss You Like Hell,” a musical about a mother and teenage daughter on a cross-country road trip. Hudes is writing the script and teaming with the composer, singer-songwriter Erin McKeown, on the lyrics.

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Hudes came to prominence in the late 2000s as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s collaborator on the musical “In the Heights,” then won the Pulitzer for drama in 2012 for “Water by the Spoonful.” The director is Lear deBessonet, who’s based at New York’s Public Theater.

Akhtar, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer for his drama “Disgraced” (which the Mark Taper Forum will stage next summer), offers “JUNK: The Golden Age of Debt,” a look at financial dealmaking behind the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s.

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The Playhouse’s announcement says the protagonist, presumably not named Gordon Gekko, is “an upstart genius hell-bent on changing all the rules.” Tony winner Doug Hughes (“Doubt”) directs. Akhtar’s 2013 play “The Who & the What” also had its premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse.

DiPietro is known for writing the book and lyrics for “Memphis,” the Tony-winning musical about the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll that was seen at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2009 before going to Broadway, and for an oft-produced musical revue “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.”

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With “Hollywood,” directed by La Jolla Playhouse Artistic Director Christopher Ashley, he’ll forgo songs in what’s described as “a noir thriller.”

One of the key figures is Will Hays, whom the film industry hired to clean up Hollywood’s act in the wake of lurid scandals in the early 1920s. One result was the Hays Code, which for decades kept anything overtly libidinous out of the picture in Hollywood movies.

The Playhouse also is throwing its support to an emerging writer, Jeff Augustin, and director, Joshua Kahan Brody, who will team for “The Last Tiger in Haiti.” A brief description says it’s about child slaves huddling and telling stories in the aftermath of an earthquake in a way that “weaves Haitian lore into a contemporary narrative of survival and betrayal.”

The Playhouse has begun selling subscriptions to the 2016-17 season, although run dates and the titles of two additional plays have yet to be announced.

mike.boehm@latimes.com

Follow @boehmm of the LA Times for arts news and features

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