Copious Notes

Studio Players announced the lineup for its 2009-10 season at Tuesday night’s members meeting in the lobby of the Carriage House Theatre on West Bell Court.

Sam Shepard

The highlight of the schedule is True West by celebrated playwright Sam Shepard, who lives in Midway. True West is a story of role reversal between two brothers, one a petty thief and the other an aspiring screenwriter. It is the first production of a Shepard play by one of Lexington’s leading theaters in several years. The play will be Studio’s March 2010 production, and a director has not been announced for the show.

All the other plays on the season have directors attached, though specific dates have not been nailed down yet. Here’s the rest of the lineup, as announced by Studio Players president-elect, David Bratcher:

• The Unexpected Guest by Agatha Christie — Gary McCormick will direct the play, which Bratcher says opens with a dead body in a wheel chair. Begins in September.
• Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol by Tom Mula — Dickens’ classic tale, told from the perspective of the guy in the heavy chains. Carly Preston directs. November.
• Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott — This is the original stage version of the hit 1967 movie starring Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman who has to contend with three thugs searching her house for a missing drug shipment. The Broadway cast was pretty good too: Lee Remick and Robert Duvall. Bob Singleton directs. January.
• Run for Your Wife by Ray Cooney — Director Ross Carter described this as a “quintessential British farce,” about a Taxi driving bigamist whose cover is blown. May.

Studio still has two productions left in its current season — Six Degrees of Separation, which runs March 19-April 5, and Dearly Beloved, May 21-June 7 — plus a summer musical, Always, Patsy Cline, July 9-Aug. 2.