The American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), Huntington Theatre Company, and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston announce programming for the 3rd Annual Emerging America — an annual festival featuring groundbreaking performance by American artists.

From June 21 through 24, Emerging America will bring together some of the country’s most promising performers, writers, companies, and directors for a weekend filled with energy, imagination, creativity, and drama.

Ticket prices range from $5 to $25, and packages are available for special discounts and experiences across all 3 institutions. For more details and for tickets visit http://www.emergingamericafestival.org.
 

This year’s events will include:

PIRATES OF PENZANCE
By Gilbert and Sullivan, Directed by Sean Graney, Performed by The Hypocrites Thursday June 21 at 8pm, Friday June 22 at 10pm, Saturday June 23 at 6pm and Sunday June 24 at 4pm – A.R.T.’s Oberon
Bringing their sold-out production from their native Chicago, The Hypocrites treat this hilarious musical in an entirely thrilling new way. Treat yourself to an eighty-minute exotic excursion featuring bathing beauties, philosophizing pirates, and grown men in remarkably short shorts! Warning: If you want boring, stay away; this experience will cause immense joy and the compulsion to spontaneously sing along. Come ashore with the “Very Model of A Modern Major General,” the Pirate King, and a banjo-picking Mabel. The show features beach balls, sunshine (the artificial kind), and tons of fun music.

THE HOTEL NEPENTHE
Huntington Theatre Company presents the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production
Written by John Kuntz, Directed by David R. Gammons
Thursday, June 21 at 7:30 and 10:30pm, Friday, June 22 at 8pm, Saturday, June 23 at 2pm and 8pm and Sunday, June 24 at 2pm – Huntington Theatre Company’s Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA
Winner of the 2011 Elliot Norton Award for Best New Script. A starlet and her paramour, a senator’s wife and a prostitute, a mother of an abducted child, a bus driver, a taxi dispatcher, a desperate lover — these lives and others intersect in and around the Hotel Nepenthe as mysteries multiply and deepen, and interactions between strangers reveal an unsettling interconnectedness among all. The 2011 Elliot Norton Award-winning ensemble of Marianna Bassham, Daniel Berger-Jones, John Kuntz, and Georgia Lyman reunites for five performances only.

STEVE CUIFFO IS LENNY BRUCE
Friday June 22 and Saturday June 23 at 8pm – A.R.T’s OBERON
The celebrated performer Steve Cuiffo has immersed himself in the work of Lenny Bruce, delivering sublime, hyper-real, verbatim resurrections of the great American thinker’s monologues. The New York Times has declared, “Lenny Bruce is brought back from the dead in the form of Mr. Cuiffo,” who will perform a compilation of Bruce “bits” on still-hot topics, including organized religion, race, illegal and prescription drugs, sexual mores, obscenity, and the Constitution. It’s fifty years later, but Bruce’s often prophetic, freedom-loving skewering of American culture is as dazzling, hilarious and insightful as ever.

EXPERIMENT AMERICA
Friday, June 22 from 9:30pm to 1am – The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
What if your phone could let you in on the secret stories of strangers in the crowd? Immersive theater artist Mikhael Tara Garver (Fornicated From the Beatles, and the sold-out Experiment America 2010) will collaborate with over fifty writers, dancers, actors, and performers to bring you an evening filled to the brim with music, dancing, and hidden discoveries with unexpected encounters waiting in your pocket and around every corner at the ICA. It’s a dance party, it’s a performance, it’s an experience: it’s Experiment America.