Signature Theater Company has chosen the celebrated South African playwright Athol Fugard as the focus of its first year in its new 74,000-square-foot home, known as Signature Center, which will open in February 2012, the theater’s leadership announced on Thursday.
Mr. Fugard, who will receive a lifetime achievement Tony Award at the annual theater industry ceremony on Sunday night, is best known in the United States for his semi-autobiographical 1982 play, “Master Harold … and the Boys,” about the relationships among a white teenager and two black servants under apartheid in 1950s South Africa. The original Broadway production ran for 10 months and was nominated for a best play Tony, as were his works “The Island,” “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” “A Lesson from Aloes” and “Blood Knot.”
The titles, dates, and directors for the Fugard series of plays will be announced later. Signature plans to move and settle into its new home this fall and winter, then run the Fugard season from February through July before returning to the theater company’s traditional fall-to-spring schedule.
Signature was founded in 1991 to honor and explore the work of playwrights, with each theater season devoted to a single writer and often including a world premiere of a new work as well as revivals of well- and less-known plays. In Signature’s new, Frank Gehry-designed center, which includes three theaters and two rehearsals spaces, the company also plans to expand its legacy program that features a new work or revival by one of its select playwrights from past years, as well as a new program that will guarantee three productions each to a group of playwrights over the course of five-year residencies.