Adrian Lester will make his Tricycle Theatre debut in a new play, Red Velvet, written by his wife, the actress Lolita Chakrabarti. The play, opening 16 Oct, marks the first in the new Tricycle regime of Indhu Rubasingham, who will also direct; Rubasingham, 41, took over the top job at the prestigious north London venue in May, following on from Nicholas Kent, who held the position for 28 years.

Red Velvet will cast Lester as the expatriate black American actor Ira Aldridge, who succeeded Edmund Kean as Othello at Covent Garden in 1833. The play will be followed by American writer Mary Zimmerman's Arabian Nights, directed by Lu Kemp and running through the holiday season (30 Nov - 12 Jan).

Early next year sees a London transfer of the 2011 Eclipse Theatre production of One Monkey Don't Stop No Show, written by Don Evans and directed by Dawn Walton; opening night is 17 Jan. After that comes Rubasingham's own production of Paper Dolls, a new play with music written by the New York-based writer, Philip Himberg, and based on the 2006 Israeli film documentary of the same name.

The play tells the real-life story of a community of Filipino immigrants in Tel Aviv who combine their work as care-givers to the elderly Orthodox Jewish community with a separate life as a sassy musical drag act.

Rubasingham told a lunchtime press conference that she wouldn't be going the verbatim theatre route so favoured by her predecessor, Kent. "That was very much Nick's stamp," said Rubasingham, who, with Kent, co-directed The Great Game, a 12-play cycle of work about Afghanistan that traveled to the Pentagon in Washington DC. "It's very important that I create my own stamp."

Rubasingham first directed at the Tricycle in 1998, since which time she has returned regularly, forging a particularly strong relationship there and at the Almeida with the Pulitzer Prize-winning American dramatist, Lynn Nottage (Ruined).