Bing tracking

2023-2024 Theater Season

The Rocky Horror Show

Music, Book, and Lyrics by Richard O’Brien

Directed by Darcey Engen

Music Direction Jill Dawe

April 12th, 7pm.
April 13th, 7pm.
April 18th, 7pm.
April 19th, 7pm.
April 20th, 7pm.
April 21st, 3pm.

The cult classic musical The Rocky Horror Show, written in 1973, brings together song, camp, fluid sexuality, and blurring gender identities in a time when any sexual difference was taboo. Rooted in B movie horror and science fiction tropes, this humorous countercultural musical sees an apparently innocent heteronormative couple “transduced” into gender non-normativity, queerness, and sexual liberation while encountering quirky characters, catchy rock and roll music, an alien scientist and his Frankenstein-like creation, and audience participation! One of the first experiences many mainstream audiences would have had to experience such thinking, The Rocky Horror Show is still as relevant today, linking 21st century thinking and experiences to question, complicate, and celebrate expansive yet controversial ideas from the 1970’s. In the current moment with its political push to erase certain experiences of gender, The Rocky Horror Show allows us to celebrate differences–so let’s do the Timewarp…again!

 

Viewer Discretion Advised: The Rocky Horror Show contains mature situations and content such as explicit sexual innuendo, adult language, diverse sexualities and gender identities, simulated sex, and violence. This production is most appropriate for mature viewers with an understanding of gender fluidity, sexuality, and individuality, and may be too intense for some viewers.

 

For Ticket Information/Box Office

 

Earlier this year…

The Clockwork Professor

by Maggie Lee

Directed by Beliza Torres Narváez

November 3rd, 7pm.
November 4th, 7pm.
November 9th, 7pm.
November 10th, 7pm.
November 11th, 7pm.
November 12th, 3pm.

Professor Shae Pemberton is a humble, secretive inventor who leads a quiet life focused on science. However, as her loyal assistant Matilda reminds her, fixing broken toys, clocks, and household gadgets is what she must do to pay the bills. When her friend Lawrence visits her with a business proposal from two shady fellows, buried secrets from her past resurface. As political unrest sweeps over the great city of New Providence, unexpected (and weird!) events start to unravel and threaten to destroy everything Pemberton holds dear, perhaps even the Crown itself! The Clockwork Professor is an action-packed adventure of fantastical science fiction with a steampunk twist.

Content Disclosure: The Clockwork Professor is a comedy intended for young adult and adult audiences. This play includes the use of some strong language (swearing) and contains suggested nudity (the characters are nude, the actors are not). There are also simulated fights, physical restraint, and a bit of romantic display of affection. Ah! And there will be some occasional theatrical smoke, too!

 

An Evening of Student Produced Work

Thursday, February 8th, 7pm.
Friday, February 9th, 7pm.
Saturday, February 10th, 7pm.
Sunday, February 11th, 3pm.

 

The Gulf

by Audrey Cefaly

Directed by Lauren Stadler

The divide between Kendra and Betty mimics the very world that devours them: a vast and polarizing abyss. On a quiet summer evening, somewhere down in the Alabama Delta, Kendra and Betty troll the flats looking for red fish.  After Betty begins diagnosing Kendra’s dead-end life with career picks from What Color is Your Parachute, their routine fishing excursion takes a violent turn.

 

And

A Girl in School Uniform (Walks Into a Bar)

by Lulu Raczka

Directed by Alondra Alamilla Benitez

A Girl in School Uniform Walks into a Bar is the third play by award-winning playwright Lulu Raczka, set in the shadows of a dystopian city. We learn that there are frequent blackouts, people regularly go missing and women are being killed. Whatever happened to create this dystopian world remains a mystery.

Schoolgirl Steph is in search of her best friend Charlotte, she enlists the help of Bell, a barmaid who runs the empty bar where Charlotte was last seen. Their conversations shift between truth, lies and fantasy. In this tense atmosphere, where there is a sense of growing fear, the play “forces the audience to turn detective not just to track down the elusive Charlotte but also to find meaning itself” (The Guardian).

 

 

 


Recent Productions…

The Living
By Anthony Clarvoe

Directed by Richard Remedios

Set in London during the plague of 1665 and based on true accounts of some who survived, The Living reveals what happens when a government under-reports the case numbers and fails to act in the face of a devastating epidemic. It is a heart-wrenching and sometimes funny display of human frailty and ignorance, courage and cowardice, survival and desperation, suffering and communion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Most Massive Woman Wins
By Madeleine George

Directed by Amanda Todd
Tjornhom-Nelson Theater, February 2-5

Challenging, brutal and hilarious, four women of various shapes and sizes sitting in the waiting room of a liposuction clinic explore their perceptions of body image. The women reveal their experiences dealing with their weight issues through monologues, short scenes, and even schoolyard rhymes. From painful childhood memories to frustrations with the opposite sex, these experiences both haunt and empower these women as they imagine their way to a new vision of themselves as beautiful and whole.

 

 

 

 

 

Macbeth
By William Shakespeare

Directed by Darcey Engen
Tjornhom-Nelson Theater, November 4–13

Shakespeare frequently reminds viewers not to misuse power–there will be consequences. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, political ambitions arise in the Scottish soldier after he receives a prophecy of power from three eerie witches–he will be a nobleman and then he will be King! Working with his wife, Macbeth kills the King and takes power–only to be caught in a web of shame and guilt that requires him to continue to murder to keep his position. Eventually both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth descent into insanity, prompting a civil war that leads to their own demise. There are consequences when one misuses power!

“INTO THE WOODS”
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by James Lapine

Directed by Darcey Engen
Music Direction by Jill Dawe

April 7 at 7 P.M.
April 8 at 7 P.M.
April 9 at 7 P.M.
April 10 at 3 P.M.

The woods can be dark, the woods can be scary, the woods can give you what you wish for—but no one leaves the woods unchanged. Into the Woods, the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapin, asks how we encounter the world in which we live, how we deal with the consequences of actions taken by others, and how our own actions create consequences as well. No one is alone!

 

 

 

White

By James Ijames

Directed by Beliza Torres Narváez

When his good friend Jane becomes the head curator at the prestigious Parnell Museum, Gus is sure his break to be a renowned painter has arrived! However, things do not turn out as he hoped. Feeling excluded as a white gay man, Gus asks his boyfriend Tanner to connect him with Vanessa, an African American actress from his improv class. He is confident Vanessa can help him create a masterpiece for the museum’s “New America” exhibit that will catapult them both to fame. Will she agree? White is a bold comedy using art to address head-on current issues of race, representation, gender, and sexuality.

 

 

Picture of white flower fluff against a black background

Iphigenia and Other Daughters

Adapted by Ellen McLaughlin

Directed by Barbra Berlovitz

A modern retelling of the fall of the House of Atreus. It follows the children of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, siblings who are both players in the family tragedy and victims of it. The cycle of blood and vengeance seems inescapable until the final reunion of a lost sister and brother brings the bloody family saga to its mystical and unlikely end.