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The Human Race Theatre Company will produce the Dayton premiere of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play Angels in America (Part One: Millennium Approaches) during its 10th anniversary season next year. The five-show season in the Loft, 126 N. Main St., will open Sept. 12 with the premiere of And That's My Story, an original production based on first-person accounts collected in the Dayton Stories Project. It also will include The Fantasticks, at 36, the world's longest-running musical; Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil, a play about legendary musician who wrote Crossroads and other blues standards; and Sylvia, a 1995 off-Broadway hit comedy.

The Human Race Theatre will get the 1995-96 season away early when it debuts at the Loft Theatre, 126 N. Main St. in the Metropolitan Arts Center with the award winning All in the Timing by David Ives on Thursday, Sept. 7. The opener will have six one-act comedies, which premiered at the Primary Stages in New York City, Dec. 1, 1993. The production won the playwright the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Playwriting Award for 1994. It also was nominated in that year for a Drama Desk Award as an outstanding play and listed as a Top Ten play by Time magazine. The six one-act comedies are Sure Thing; Words, Words, Words; The Universal Language; The Philadelphia; Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread and English Made Simple.N.

Dayton's Human Race Theatre Company has announced a 10th anniversary season that will include two plays by Pulitzer Prize-winners and an original production based on stories drawn from the Miami Valley. But it will also mean slightly higher ticket prices and, in most cases, shows with small casts as the area's only resident professional stage troupe strives to keep production expenses down in the face of ongoing economic challenges. The five-show subscription season in The Loft Theatre, on the third floor of the Metropolitan Arts Center, will include:

SUBHED} Dayton's Human Race Theatre Company has extended the run of Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches, following a sold-out opening week in the 220-seat Loft Theatre. `We've never sold out the first four performances of any show. We can't do better than that,' Marsha Hanna, artistic director of the 10-year-old company, said Monday. Millennium Approaches is the first of two parts of a script by Tony Kushner. Part two, Perestroika, will be presented Sept. 11-28, also at The Loft.

KICKR} `ANGELS IN AMERICA' SUBHED} * Protest and praise surround Kushner's controversial themes and staging Angels in America is not to be confused with `Angels on Parade,' a show of collectible dolls and figurines that ends today at Hara Arena. The play that opens at The Loft in downtown Dayton Thursday night is not family fare. The Human Race Theatre Company, which is marketing the play as `a masterpiece' that `ennobles American theater as no other work in recent memory,' is also warning the public that it contains graphic language and nudity. One scene in the script by Tony Kushner calls for full frontal male nudity - the unclad male is an emaciated AIDS victim being examined in a medical office. Another depicts a simulated sex act involving two men in a park. There is a lot of profanity throughout.

Staged by first-time director Stefan Klum, whose quick intellect and daring physical style as an actor have accessed anarchical harmony in the material, the production pays considerable homage to the definitive Steppenwolf Theatre presentation of more than a decade ago. As well it should. Like a financier who keeps getting deliveries of piggy banks, [Bruce] Cromer is a classically trained performer in a community that's been hung up on popular entertainment and contemporary novelty for years. He's always been good, in productions like Bus Stop and The Sea Horse, but up until now, he's always been been something of a fish out of water. He's always been a hitchhiker who keeps getting rides that refuse to take the turnoff to Stratford-on-Avon. Yet he's always kept his hope and his body in fighting trim, which he most definitely is in this agile, muscular, rewardingly detailed portrayal of Lee, the bad, hard-drinking, uneducated, dangerous, head-slapping brother in [Sam] Shepard's incredibly humorous but disturbing two-act play. At least, that's the way he starts out.

The comedy by Chicago playwright James Sherman is the trite and trivializing conclusion to the Human Race Theatre Company's six-play season at The Loft, a season that promised theatergoers the kind of \"in your face\" stuff they can't get anywhere else. That's laughably untrue in this two-act sitcom treatment of interfaith romance and marriage in a Jewish family that has one foot rooted in tradition and the other seeking a toehold in contemporary American quicksand. The central character in this still-pertinent conflict is Sarah Goldman, an attractive young woman with a serious Gentile boyfriend her parents don't approve of, apparently just because he isn't Jewish. At least, that's the way Sarah sees it. And that's the way the audience is encouraged to see it as well.

You say Sarah [Goldman] said she invented Dr. Steinberg so her parents would stop bugging her about finding a \"nice Jewish boyfriend.\" You say that her parents now wanted to meet Dr. Steinberg. So Sarah, ever resourceful, called an escort service to send her a date. You say, Bo, if I don't believe you I should just go to the Loft Theatre in the Metropolitan Arts Center, 126 N. Main St. where the Human Racewill give bring to life Beau Jest, who, jest me not, will laughingly perform the romantic comedy, including the kugel.

\"Two shows a night and what a week! The airline sent my fright wig to Honolulu. The wig's part of my act. I had to do two shows without it. I'm glad they didn't lose my dress ... because the people in the audience were eating dinner,\" she replies, ending with that trademark throaty laugh. Later, talking about her home in California, the 77-year-old comedian says, \"I live in Brentwood. Get it? Brentwood? As in O.J. Simpson. My place is a mile-and-a-half from his. My other neighbors are Roseanne and Meryl Streep. Michelle Pfeiffer lived there, too, but she moved after she found out I was there.\" Phyllis Diller - whose credits include live theater, movies, television and nightclubs - is scheduled to do 45 minutes of standup comedy next Sunday night at The Human Race Theatre Company's \"Mardi Gras\" fund-raiser in the Loft in downtown Dayton.

If good acting can really save a bad play, all of the Human Race Theatre Company cast members deserved gold medals for the CPR they performed on Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine Thursday night. The comedy-contemporary drama - which continues through Feb. 12 in The Loft in downtown Dayton - isn't much. Fortunately, stunning performances by the show's seven cast members saved the evening from being a total disaster.