Ionesco, Shakespeare, Shaw, O’Neill. Every new season at The Pearl starts with great playwrights, and with these four The Pearl Theatre Company makes this pledge to you: our 2011-2012 season is intended to excite the imagination, surprise the mind, and move the heart. I’m very happy to announce the plays for the company’s 28^th season and our third year at New York City Center. Hilarious, lyrical, tragic, comic, and sublime, these four plays are renowned world classics that land with compelling urgency in our own time.

The 2011-2012 Pearl year kicks off in September with one of the longest running plays in the world, Eugene Ionesco’s lunatic, bizarre, and brilliant The Bald Soprano. In continuous performance in Paris since 1957, and praised for its absurdity and its hilarity, The Bald Soprano is an acclaimed modern classic. William Shakespeare’s moving and powerful Richard II will follow in November and December, the unforgettable drama of a king – and a country – caught in a whirlwind of civil strife, upheaval, and change. Bernard Shaw’s wickedly funny The Philanderer is set to arrive in early 2012, a sharply witty satire on feminism, free-thinking, and, yes, philandering. Beginning next March, the 28th season will conclude with Eugene O’Neill’s haunting tale of loss, love, and redemption, A Moon For The Misbegotten.

Ionesco, Shakespeare, Shaw, and O’Neill, four of the world’s most remarkable playwrights; designed, directed and performed with the panache of The Pearl, a company I hope you’ll always know as a class act with the classics.

I invite you to join us as a subscriber to this great new season! Your faith in our work is a vote of confidence to our mission and vital support for The Pearl’s production of great plays. I look forward to welcoming you to the season!

J. R. Sullivan