New Geffen Season Opens With ‘Blue Sky’

Four West Coast premieres, including a new play by the Tony Award-winning book writer of the musical “James Joyce’s The Dead,” will be part of the Geffen Playhouse’s 2002-03 season.

Opening the season will be David Eldridge’s “Under the Blue Sky,” Sept. 18-Oct. 20. Set in Britain, where it was produced at the Royal Court Theatre, it consists of three interconnecting plays about the after-hours affairs of three pairs of teachers. The U.S. premiere is slated for June in Williamstown, Mass. The Geffen production will be staged by the theater’s producing director, Gilbert Cates. His last directorial effort at the Geffen was 1999’s “Collected Stories,” starring Linda Lavin and Samantha Mathis.

Choreographer Debbie Allen conceived and will direct “Pearl” (Nov. 20-Dec. 22), a contemporary adaptation of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” with music by Allen, two-time Grammy winner James Ingram and Diane Louie. Allen directed an earlier version of “Pearl” at the Kennedy Center in Washington. She appeared in “Harriet’s Return” at the Geffen in 1998.

Randall Arney, Geffen artistic director, will stage Rebecca Gilman’s “Boy Gets Girl,” Feb. 5-March 9, 2003, about a woman journalist who becomes the object of a man’s obsession. It was commissioned by and premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2000. Laguna Playhouse presented the Columbus, Ohio, playwright’s “Spinning Into Butter” last September.

Richard Nelson’s “Franny’s Way,” April 15-May 18, 2003, is a memory play about two sisters who visit their married cousin in New York in the summer of 1957. It opened off-Broadway earlier this year. Nelson, who won “The Dead” Tony Award in 2000, also wrote “Madame Melville,” which ran in London and off-Broadway last year and starred Macaulay Culkin.

A fifth play for the end of the season will be announced later.