The University Musical Society, the performing-arts presenting group at the University of Michigan, today announced 5 productions making up its 2010-11 theater season.

Laurie Anderson

The season includes acclaimed performance artist/musician Laurie Anderson in a 2-night offering of her work "Delusion"; the acclaimed Druid Theater Company presenting Martin McDonagh’s "The Cripple of Inishman"; two works by the all-male Shakespeare troupe Propeller; and "Susurrus," a highlight of last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, performed at Matthaei Botanical Gardens. (The other productions will be at the Power Center.)

Subscription ticket sales to the series begin next month, while tickets to individual events will go on sale in August.

The full announcement from UMS:

The University Musical Society announces its 10/11 International Theater Series, which begins on Thursday, September 9, 2010, and ends on Sunday, April 3, 2011. The series features four productions at the Power Center (121 Fletcher Street, Ann Arbor), and one site-specific production at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens (1800 North Dixboro Road, Ann Arbor).

The series begins with one of the major hits of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Susurrus is a play without actors and without a stage (Thursday, September 9 - Sunday, October 3). It is part radio play, part avant-garde sonic art, part lesson in bird dissection, and part stroll through nature. Individuals follow a map around the Matthaei Botanical Gardens as they listen to a recording on an iPod and headphones. The listener hears snippets about opera, memorial benches, and botany, which fit together into a mournful and poignant story of love and loss that is loosely inspired by Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden’s collaboration on Britten’s opera, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Susurrus was first presented to great acclaim and sellout audiences at Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens in 2006 and later mentioned by both The Guardian and The Scotsman as one of the top arts events of the year.

Next, one of America’s most renowned — and daring — creative pioneers, Laurie Anderson, appears in her new work Delusion (Friday, January 14 - Saturday, January 15). Recognized worldwide as a leader in the use of technology in the arts, Anderson is known widely for her multimedia presentations, casting herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. At the heart of Delusion, which premiered at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, is the pleasure of language and a fear that the world is made entirely of words. Conceived as a series of short mystery plays, Delusion jump-cuts between the everyday and the mythic, evoking a world filled with nuns, elves, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives, and unmanned tankers. Employing a series of altered voices and imaginary guests, Anderson combines her signature violin pieces, electronic puppetry, music, and visuals, with the poetic language that has become her trademark to tell a complex story about longing, memory, and identity.

In March, Ireland’s acclaimed Druid Theater Company makes its UMS debut with Martin McDonagh’s critically acclaimed 2008 production The Cripple of Inishmaan, directed by Garry Hynes (Thursday, March 10 - Sunday, March 13). The play is set in 1934, and news is thin on the island of Inishmaan. Then word arrives that a Hollywood filmmaker is coming to a neighboring island to shoot a movie, and excitement ripples through the sleepy community. For Billy Claven, a crippled orphan, the film provides an opportunity to get away from his bleak existence. He auditions for a part in the film and, to everyone’s surprise, gets his chance. The Cripple of Inishmaan is “a break-your-heart, cruelly funny evening directed with an exhilarating ruthlessness and acted with a bracing lack of sentimentality.” (The Guardian) The second play in Martin McDonagh’s Aran Islands trilogy, it is infused with his trademark humor, rich with macabre cruelty, and teeming with eccentric island characters, from Billy’s “Aunt Kate,” who talks to stones, to gossip monger “JohnnyPateenMike,” who attempts to get his elderly mother to drink herself to death.

Finally, Edward Hall — son of the English theater director Sir Peter Hall —brings his theater company Propeller to Ann Arbor for the first time with a total of seven performances of two Shakespeare plays: Richard III and The Comedy of Errors (Wednesday, March 30 - Sunday, April 3). Propeller evolved out of Hall’s first Shakespeare play for the Watermill Theater in the mid-1990s. His all-male company mimics the theater of Shakespeare’s time and mixes a rigorous approach to the text with a modern physical aesthetic. Hall says, “I want to rediscover Shakespeare simply by doing plays as I believe they should be done: with great clarity, speed, and full of as much imagination in the staging as possible. I don’t want to make the plays ‘accessible,’ as this implies that they need ‘dumbing down’ in order to be understood, which they don’t.” The two plays will be presented in repertory, with the same cast members performing both plays.

Information about Tickets & Subscription Packages Subscription renewal packets will be mailed to current subscribers in early May. Subscription sales will open to the general public mid-May. Tickets to individual events will be available for purchase in late August.

To be added to the mailing list, please contact the UMS Ticket Office at 734-764-2538 or visit www.ums.org. UMS also has an e-mail list that provides up-to-date information about all UMS events; sign-up information is available on the website.