Playwrights Horizons Season To Range from Simpsons to Kama Sutra

Playwrights Horizons is once again putting women front and center in the company’s 2013-2014 season, staging four plays by women, including two world premieres. Three of the first five plays the Off Broadway company announced on Thursday will also be directed by women.

The season will begin with “Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play,” a post-apocalyptic tale by Anne Washburn about a future in which the “Cape Feare” episode of the “The Simpsons” is all that remains of Western literature. The play was unveiled last year at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C., to good reviews. The New York production will have the same director, Steve Cosson, and previews start Aug. 23.

Playwrights will also host the premieres of “The Patron Saint of Sea Monsters,” by Marlane Meyer and directed by Lisa Peterson; and “The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence,” by Madeleine George and directed by Leigh Silverman.

“Patron Saint,” a comedy about a determined romantic who falls for a hard-drinking womanizer, will begin on Oct. 18. “Watson Intelligence” is a time-jumping meditation on man and machine, revolving around four characters named Watson â€" Sherlock’s Holmes sidekick, the engineer who built the first telephone, a supercomputer that won “Jeopardy!” and a present-day technology lover. It opens in November.

Beginning in May 2014, the company plans to stage “Fly By Night: A New Musical” by Kim Rosenstock, Will Connolly and Michael Mitnick, a darkly comic rock fable about a lowly sandwich-maker set against the blackout of 1965. The show had its premiere at TheaterWorks in Palo Alto, Calif., in July 2011, but has never been produced in New York.

Also on the schedule for next spring is “Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra,” a new play by the Texas playwright Kirk Lynn, directed by Anne Kauffman (“Belleville”). It is a comedy about a married couple who agree to re-enact their sexual histories for one another.

The current Playwrights Horizons season includes plays by Annie Baker, Amy Herzog, Tanya Barfield, and Lisa D’Amour, with Ms. Kauffman and Ms. Silverman among the directors.