Inspired by the conservative outcry after a popular children’s television show spotlighted a family with two mothers, playwright Cusi Cram’s biting comedy Dusty and the Big Bad World lost its topical hook on the eve of its first production in January 2009. “It opened four days after Obama was inaugurated and it seemed like old news, pulling funding from public television and censoring children’s shows,” said MJ Bruder Munafo, artistic and executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, who is directing Dusty and the Big Bad World in its second-ever public run.
But, Ms. Bruder Munafo added, under the current presidential administration there has again been talk of defunding the public broadcasting system and Cram’s satire has teeth once more. The play, in previews beginning June 30, and running from July 6 through July 29, is a darkly hilarious — but even-handed — take on political correctness.
In his review of the original production at the Denver Center, Denver Post critic John Moore called it “a genial and witty political comedy closely based on the real ‘Bustergate’ scandal of 2005.
“Here, imagine an animated dustball who’s bigger than Big Bird,” Mr. Moore wrote. “When he visits a girl with two daddies, the incoming Department of Education secretary cancels the show’s public funding, forcing Dusty off the air and sending a pointed message that public TV is no place for kids to be learning about anything that strays from the right’s definition of traditional family values.”
Eleven-year-old Lizzie — the only character onstage who’s not undergoing some kind of personal crisis — is played by two teens from Oak Bluffs. Fourteen-year-old Nina Moore and 13-year-old Kaya Seiman will alternate performances during the show’s run. This is a common practice with child actors on Broadway, but a first for the playhouse, Ms. Bruder Munafo said.
To play Secretary of Education Marianne Fitzgibbons, Ms. Bruder Munafo signed Charlotte Booker, the actress who originated the role at the Denver Center eight years ago.
“She is one funny lady,” Ms. Bruder Munafo said.
Nina and Kaya also get their laugh lines, as when their character attempts to make sense of the predicament by reasoning, “I totally get that everyone except people in big cities and parts of Massachusetts are homophobic.”
Ms. Cram, the playwright, knows her subject well. She and her husband Peter Hirsch were writers for the long-running public TV series Arthur when the show’s spinoff, Postcards from Buster, aired the controversial episode. Both writers are set to appear on a panel Ms. Bruder Munafo is organizing with WGBH, the afternoon of July 7 at the playhouse.
The second main stage production at the playhouse this season, the world premiere of Who You See Here, also has an Arthur connection. Playwright Matt Hoverman won the 2014 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Writing in an Animated Program and the 2015 Humanities Prize for Children’s Animation for his writing on the series.
Who You See Here is a “highly original, very funny play,” said Ms. Bruder Munafo, who had previously sought to produce Hoverman’s antic comedy after reading the script a few years ago.
“It got optioned for Broadway,” she said. “That’s not the first time this has happened. I have a good eye for these plays.”
Hoverman’s farce skewers therapy, recovery, fame and obscurity with equal wit and wicked glee. But in the end, no Broadway production materialized and Ms. Bruder Munafo was able to secure the show for this season, with Jeannie Hackett directing. Previews start August 4.
Thirty years after its Broadway debut, Driving Miss Daisy opens in previews Sept. 8.
“Most people have seen the movie; hardly anyone has seen the play, and the play is a little different,” said Ms. Bruder Munafo, who is directing Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer-winner about a Jewish matron and her African-American chauffeur in the American South.
“There are so many funny moments and sweet moments and it covers a range of issues — racism, anti-semitism, ageism,” Ms. Bruder Munafo said. It’s also about caring for one another despite circumstances, she added.
Along with the main stage productions, the playhouse has a busy schedule of Monday Night Specials, one-night-only staged readings that regularly draw full houses.
“They’re all interesting and pretty much every one of them is brand new,” Ms. Bruder Munafo said. The series has been so successful, she added, that the season is being extended on both ends: from mid-June to well into September.
“This is one of the most terrific lineups of Monday Night Specials we’ve had in a while,” she said. The series includes a July 17 reading from Moss Hart and Kitty Carlyle Hart’s 1948 play Light Up the Sky, directed by the couple’s son Chris Hart, who will also talk about his parents.
Playwright and summer Islander Larry Mollin’s new work, Please Come to Boston, gets the Monday Night treatment August 7. Directed by Randal Myler with a cast of actor-musicians from New York city, the play reimagines the events behind the writing of Dave Loggins’s title song, a chart-topping hit from 1973.
The playhouse continues its Saturday morning summer children’s theatre program, The Fabulists, at the Tisbury Amphitheater this summer. Also at the amphitheater, the annual Shakespeare Out-of-Doors productions take place Wednesday through Saturday, July 12 through August 12.
The selection of Julius Caesar for this year’s play may seem at first to be asking for trouble, after the Public Theater’s Donald Trump-themed production drew protests in Central Park earlier this year. But director Brooke Hardman Ditchfield has something different in store for Vineyard audiences: an all-female cast will perform the political tragedy.
It’s not the first time the playhouse has done Shakespeare without men, Ms. Bruder Munafo said. “I did an all-female Romeo and Juliet a few years ago, and it was fabulous.”
For information and tickets, visit mvplayhouse.org.
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