Urban Samurai Productions

Season 2012 will open with the regional premiere of this comedic homage to the B-movie horror genre by local playwright Allison Moore, a 2010 Ivey Award winner for her original play, My Antonia. Riddled with wit and twists, Slasher is a caustic satire following Sheena, an underprivileged student-waitress who negotiates her way into the lead role of a horror film. When her feminist, pill-popping mother threatens to shut the production down, Sheena must slice her way through a myriad of scary-movie cliches, a dysfunctional family, and the occasional pro-life demonstration. As tensions mount with the production nearing collapse, Sheena will do everything she can to make it out of this film alive.
 
A polemical piece of theater from David Mamet, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Glengarry Glen Ross, Race highlights three biting and successful attorneys - two black and one white - who are presented the opportunity to defend a white man charged with sexual assault against a black mistress he claims to love. The lawyers and the defendant grapple with the evidence and their respective opinions on race while delivering fiercely blunt rhetoric that cuts to the incongruent heart of stereotype and racial hypocrisy. Mamet describes Race as a "drama about lies...race...and the lies we tell each other on the subject."
 
 A conniving and treacherous tale, Les liaisons dangereuses provides the audience a rather voyeuristic peek into the elite world of Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, rivals who use sex as weapons in a game of humiliation and degradation. Merteuil discovers that her former lover plans to marry a well-born virgin, Cecile, and enlists Valmont to seduce Cecile, which will humiliate the man who left her. Jimmy LeDuc, who directed Season 2010's Bright Ideas, returns to USP in order to transcend this classic story of impulse and pleasure into modern-day relevance.