Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part preview about Plan-B Theatre’s 2009-2010 season. The second part, to be run on Oct. 14, will be a preview of Radio Hour: Alice, the world premiere by Matthew Ivan Bennett.

In the West – particularly in Salt Lake City – how we individually imagine our sense of belonging, place, and identity remains a highly controversial, problematic exercise. The old vs. new dichotomy is hardly satisfactory especially when we forget that even the old was once exotic and new. Each of us participates in this brutal, noisy political game of constructing our “space” by continuously making, challenging, and refuting claims about what this place is, was, or should be.

How we reconcile this debate directly involves us taking a step back and examining the social processes of interactions and institutions the community deems appropriate in promoting and protecting specific imagined meanings. However, reconciliation comes erroneously often at the preservation of belligerence, personal aggrandizement, and a self-absorbed pretentious sense of the individual – not only in the West but also throughout every other American community.

In the plainest terms, we’re lost – pinned in by our fears, our lack of humility and civility, skepticism, and cynicism – and we’re desperately trying to figure how to recapture our identity. In the forthcoming season of Plan-B Theatre, the company asks directly: Can we make sense together while living differently?

Plan-B’s 19th season, much like the previous one, will explore the historical impulses that compel our myth-making experiences and how we clarify the distinctions between fantasy and imagination. Last season, there was the classic Frankenstein story returned to its original form, the nearly forgotten impact of the starkest form of prejudice and injustice embodied in a Japanese interment camp, the mystery of Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished masterpieces, and the fresh memories of Utah-based censorship played in urgent, raw form.

This season, the journey finds new venues for this exploration. In ‘Radio Hour: Alice,’ Lewis Carroll’s classic story takes on nightmarish dimensions in Matthew Ivan Bennett’s treatment reminiscent of Poe’s classic question: “Is all that we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?” The words, puns, and riddles of the Underworld are endowed with menacing shadows, perfect for the fifth annual radio hour as part of the Halloween season. However, in this coming-of-age story, the traditional theatrical walls are torn down so that like Alice, audience members must mercilessly wrestle themselves from being delivered utterly helpless into the hands of sinister enemies and extinction.

Ten performances, directed by Cheryl Ann Cluff, will be offered from Oct. 22 to Oct. 31 in the Studio Theatre at The Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts, the normal venue for Plan-B productions. The company once again has moved the production out of the radio studio and has staged it as a live radio-style set with music and sound effects and the audience amid the action. The 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. performances on Oct. 30 will air live on KUER’s RadioWest and on XM Satellite Radio.

The actors, dressed in simple theatre black, will sit on stools in front of the microphones. With a script running just under 48 minutes, the pacing will be relentless in energy with caesuras hardly long enough for the cast and audience to re-situate themselves.

A sense of home is at the center of ‘Wallace’ by playwrights Jenifer Nii and Debora Threedy, which will run March 4-14. The story, originally written as separate pieces by each playwright, is an imaginary meeting between Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize winning author born in Iowa who adopted Salt Lake City as his hometown, and the lesser known Wallace Thurman, a Salt Lake City Utah native who moved to Harlem in 1925 as a novelist and key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Thurman, who died in 1934 at the age of 32, wrote ‘The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life.’

“Despite the numerous and obvious differences in biography, there are so many uncanny interesting connections between the two men who both had strong ties to Utah,” Jerry Rapier, Plan-B’s producing director, explains. “They were both essentially strangers in a strange land who turned to writing to describe what it means to have a place called home.”

The play’s genesis is unusual as well. Threedy was working on a one-act play about Stegner for a Utah symposium celebrating the writer’s centennial anniversary of his birth at the same time Nii was working on her one-act piece about Thurman. Rapier suggested that instead of presenting the two acts separately, the playwrights could weave the stories into a single play.

Eric Samuelsen’s ‘Amerigo,’ to be presented from April 8-18, tackles the myth of the American frontier identity in the form of a juried debate in purgatory featuring Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci as moderated by Niccolo Machiavelli and judged by Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, a 17th Century Mexican playwright/poet/lesbian nun. As much as the frontier metaphor is deployed in campaigns to reform, renew and re-establish American superiority, Samuelsen’s play seeks to liberate the mythical symbols of frontier exploration from their most destructive and delusional tendencies and to change their meaning into something more vital and responsive to the limits created by our own worst habits.

It hints strongly at how we can begin to reconstruct our own mental pictures about the world and our place in it, Rapier says, adding that audience members will easily find a solid deal of relevance to contemporary issues, including globalism, immigration reform, and the environment.

Finally, after the smashing success of last year’s combining for the first time the company’s annual fundraiser celebrating the First Amendment and the 24-hour playwrights’ SLAM event, Plan-B will reprise the event on May 1 at the Rose’s Jeanne Wagner Theatre. Five playwrights again will have 12 hours to create a 10-minute play based on recent Utah-based incidents that cut through the core of freedom of expression. The scripts last year dug deeply, challenging at every corner the semantic engineering that drives censorship, suppression, and repression especially as a predominant culture, working from collective fears and uncertainties, works hard to shape the public colloquial language with ideally preferred meanings that simultaneously construct how the community can and cannot be perceived.

The show again will be hosted by local radio personalities Doug Fabrizio and Bill Allred and will include Derek Jones and Matt Aune, the young gay couple who were at the center of last summer’s famous kiss incident on the Temple Square plaza.

The event is the only formal fundraiser for Plan-B, which will be marking its 20th anniversary season next year.

As usual, Plan-B will be involved with the playwright workshops in collaboration with the Meat and Potato Theatre. Plan-B’s core strength is its consistent capacity to give platforms for local playwrights who respond with integrity and passion about what they experience and what they feel. Being relaunched this season is the Script-in-Hand Series which include 30-minute one-act plays by lab playwrights — John Belliston, Matthew Ivan Bennett, Megan Crivello, Deborah DeVos, Elaine Jarvik, Kyle Nelson, Jenifer Nii and Debora Threedy. Readings (free) will be held March 10, April 14 and May 19, 2010 at 7 p.m in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner.

Season subscriptions are available for just $87 (15 percent off the full cost of $102), on sale now by calling 801-297-4200 or by visiting here.

Single tickets for individual productions are on sale now as well, just $20 for all shows except ‘And The Banned Slammed On’ which are between $25 and $40. Single tickets can be purchased by calling 801-355-ARTS or by visiting here. Student tickets at $10 apiece also are available for all shows.