A short note to remind you of PTP/NYC‘s summer production season, featuring an evening of plays for solo performance by Howard Barker, which premieres this week at New York’s Atlantic Stage 2, opening tonight and running through 1 August. This year, Wrestling School associate and PTP co-founder Richard Romagnoli directs two poems for the theatre by Barker. The fine Robert Emmet Lunney (of Broadway’s The Graduate and other PTP Barker productions) will perform Gary the Thief, originally written for Gary Oldman, about a criminal who defines himself in direct opposition to “the crowd,” and the equally fine Alex Draper will perform Barker’s Plevna: Meditations on Hatred.

As to the other plays in the repertory this summer, Draper also stars in Snoo Wilson’s Lovesong of the Electric Bear, which examines mathematician Alan Turing’s life from his childhood to his deathbed; Cheryl Faraone directs. Jim Petosa’s revival of David Rabe’s A Question of Mercy centers on two lovers, one of whom is waging a losing battle with AIDS.

As Time Out New York‘s Helen Shaw has written, “The Potomac Theatre Project produces Barker in steady, stripped-down presentations, often with riveting central performances,” and of last year’s season the New York Times‘ Neil Genzlinger wrote that “the company [stands] out amid the season’s fluff and fringiness as one to turn to for serious work.” More information, including a full schedule of dates and times for all three productions, is available at PTP/NYC’s Web site.