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Theatre Mainstage: Black Box Theater - Oct. 24-27, 31, & Nov. 1-2, 2024

Produced by special arrangement with Samuel French/Concord theatricals

Two women, scientists, living hundreds of years apart, explore the meaning of legacy, motherhood, and art in this time jumping contemporary comedy. Legacy of Light links the story of the 18th century mathematician and scientist, Émilie du Châtelet who became unexpectedly pregnant at 42 (during her entanglement with philosopher Voltaire), with that of a 21st century physicist desperately trying to conceive and child. Legacy of Light made its world premiere at the Arena Stage in Washington DC on May 8th, 2009.

By Karen Zacarias

Karen Zacarías, recently hailed by American Theater Magazine as one of the ten most-produced playwrights in the US, is known for her play Mariela in the Desert - winner of the National Latino Playwriting Award. She is one of the inaugural resident playwrights at Arena Stage, a core founder of the Latino Theatre Commons and the founder of Young Playwrights’ Theater, an award-winning theater company teaching playwriting in Washington, D.C. public schools.  Ms. Zacarias’ plays have been produced by some of the country’s most respected theatre companies including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Arena Stage, The Goodman Theater, Round House Theater, The Denver Center, Alliance Theater, Imagination Stage, GALA Hispanic Theater, Berkshire Theater Festival, South Coast Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, Cleveland Playhouse, and San Jose Repertory Theater. 

Theatre Mainstage: Burg Theater - Dec. 5-8, 2024

Produced by special arrangement with Octavio Solis

William Joad has no heir to whom he can bequeath the family farm — until he learns of Martín Jodes, a young Mexican-American migrant worker descended from Tom Joad, the protagonist of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In a reversal of the Joads’ epic Route 66 journey, William and Martín embark on a road trip from California’s migrant farm camps to Oklahoma: confronting their brutal pasts, gathering a unique chorus of travelers, and forging a new American family along the way. One of the most celebrated living writers of the Mexican-American experience, Octavio Solis’ soaring poetry, gritty realism, and mythic scope captures the intersection of people, cultures, and migration in the American West.

By Octavio Solis

Octavio Solis is considered, by many, to be one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America. He has written over 25 plays, included his most famous and celebrated works: Lydia, Santos & Santos, and Man of the Flesh. Solis is the recipient of the National Latino Playwriting Award, The Roger L. Stevens Award: Kennedy Center's Fund for New American Plays, Playwriting Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Playwrights' Center’s McKnight Fellowship, and Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater Award by the William Inge Center for the Arts. With works that both draw on and transcend the Mexican-American experience, Solis is an imaginative and ever-evolving writer whose work continues to cross cultural and aesthetic boundaries, solidifying him as one of the great playwrights of our time.

Theatre Mainstage: Burg Theater - Jan. 30-Feb. 2, 2025

Considered by many to be one of the greatest plays ever written, King Lear sees two ageing fathers – one a King, the other his courtier – reject the children who truly love them. Their blindness unleashes a tornado of pitiless ambition and treachery, as family and state are plunged into a violent power struggle with bitter ends.

Caught in a carousel of memory, the head of a dysfunctional family grapples with power-hungry children and the threat of losing the empire he created. Real and imagined worlds coalesce, creating a political and personal horror that threatens to swallow the mind of a monarch. 

By William Shakespeare

Theatre Mainstage: Burg Theater - April 3-6, 2025

Richard Davenport, a black captain, is assigned to a investigate a murder of a black non-commissioned officer at a segregated army base in 1944 Louisiana. Captain Taylor, the white commanding officer, worries that the murderer may be a white officer or the local Klan and fears the assignment of a black investigator only means the case is to be swept under the rug. The officers, and the soldiers they lead, confront the deeply held prejudices that are far more complex than black and white in this unique gender-blind production of Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.  

By Charles Fuller

Charles Fuller won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for A Soldier's Play, during its original Off-Broadway run. Fuller began his would audience and critical acclaimed career in the 1970’s, creating work for the Henry Street Settlement theatre and, eventually, the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, under artistic director Douglas Turner Ward. Fuller was awarded with grants from the , , the , and the  and his other notable works include The Village: a Party (1968), The Brownsville Raid (1976), and Zooman and the Sign (1980). Forty years after its original debut, A Soldier's Play made its Broadway debut on January 21, 2020, for which it was subsequently nominated and awarded the Tony Award for Best Rival of a Play despite having never previously appeared on Broadway.

Studio Series: Burg Theater - Sept. 26-29, 2024

By Kimberly Belflower

At a rural high school in Georgia, a group of lively teens are studying  while navigating young love, sex ed, and a few school scandals. Holding a contemporary lens to the American classic, they begin to question who is really the hero and what is the truth, discovering their own power in the process. Alternately touching and bitingly funny, this new comedy captures a generation in mid-transformation, running on pop music, optimism, and fury, writing their own coming of age story.

Studio Series: Black Box Theatre - Nov. 7-10, 2024

By Madeleine George

Meet Diane, a permaculture gardener dripping with butch charm. She’s got supernatural abilities owing to her true identity—the Greek god Dionysus—and she's returned to the modern world to gather mortal followers and restore the Earth to its natural state. Where better to begin than with four housewives in a suburban New Jersey cul-de-sac? In this Obie-winning comedy with a twist, Pulitzer Prize finalist Madeleine George pens a hilarious evisceration of the blind eye we all turn to climate change and the bacchanalian catharsis that awaits us, even in our own backyards.

Studio Series: Black Box Theatre - Nov. 21-24, 2024

By Euripedes

What happens when love turns to hate? Medea, a powerful sorceress, sacrifices everything for Jason, the man she loves. But when he betrays her, Medea’s devotion converts to rage and drives her to revenge. Director Chaslee Schweitzer collaborates with student artists to devise a unique telling of Euripides’ tragic tale and explore the complexities of one of theatre's most powerful female characters. 

Studio Series: Black Box Theatre - Feb. 13-16, 2024

By Tony Kushner

A lawyer, facing mortality, desperate to find the son he drove away years before, travels in the dead of night to a mysterious cave. There he engages the services of a wizard, who conjures up visions of the romantic, adventurous, perilous life the lawyer’s son has been living since his father expelled him from home. THE ILLUSION, freely adapted from Pierre Corneille’s L’ILLUSION COMIQUE, is Kushner’s most joyfully theatrical play, a wildly entertaining tale of passion and regret, of love, disillusionment and magic.

Studio Series: Black Box Theatre - Feb. 20-23, 2025

By Jason Pizzarello

The residents of the small town of Bethel are facing a crisis: Their beloved park has been sold out from under them and it's sending their lives into a tailspin. In nine interconnected vignettes, sixteen locals grapple with the loss of jobs, homes, and spouses, but find love, courage, and forgiveness as the park magically transforms through four seasons of the year in a single day. From a tired security guard trying get home to her kids, to a young mayor in over his head, to a nostalgic fisherman who can't seem to catch anything, everyone takes a fall... and picks themselves up again. Bethel Park Falls draws a group of complex, fascinating, funny people together into one poignant story about the spaces where communities connect.

Studio Series: Black Box Theatre - Feb. 27-March 2, 2025

By Aaron Posner

 In this brash reworking of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a group of old friends, ex-lovers, estranged in-laws, and lifelong enemies gather to grapple with life’s thorniest questions—and each other. What could possibly go wrong? Incurably lustful and lonely, hapless and hopeful, these seven souls collide and stumble their way towards a new understanding that LIFE SUCKS! Or does it?

Studio Series: Black Box Theatre - March. 27-30, 2025

By Will Arbery

It's nearing midnight in Wyoming, where four young conservatives have gathered at a backyard after-party. They've returned home to toast their mentor Gina, newly inducted as president of a tiny Catholic college. But as their reunion spirals into spiritual chaos and clashing generational politics, it becomes less a celebration than a vicious fight to be understood. On a chilly night in the middle of America, Will Arbery's haunting play offers grace and disarming clarity, speaking to the heart of a country at war with itself.