2021 SEASON
February will bring you two exciting plays.
First up we have The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler
This Obie Award-winning play is a whirlwind tour of the forbidden zone and introduces a wildly divergent gathering of female voices. Almost like poetry, each soliloquy reveals a different woman's experience with topics like sex, love, tenderness, embarrassment, cruelty, pain, and pleasure. This show will run for one night only in early February.
Following closely on its heels will be, She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen.
Agnes Evans is a completely average woman who strives to be nothing but average until the day she wishes her life were a little less boring. Her wish, unfortunately, comes true when her family, including her younger sister Tilly, dies in a car crash. As Agnes is cleaning Tilly’s room, she finds a module Tilly had written for Dungeons &Dragons. In order to get closer to the sister she never really knew, Agnes embarks on her own adventure with the help of a Dungeon Master to play the game as Tilly designed. As she delves deeper into her quest, the fantasy world and reality begin to collide and mix as Agnes searches to connect with Tilly and realizes how much of her sister she never knew.
She Kills Monsters allows actors to truthfully represent the LGBTQIA+ community in a show that goes beyond the ‘tragic Hollywood tale of characters discovering their sexuality,” and instead lifts them up and celebrates.
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March sees a shift in tone to a one-woman show, Shirley Valentine by Willy Russell.
When Maine is at its coldest and snowiest, let us transport you to not only the UK, but the Greek islands.
Shirley Valentine is a bored, middle-aged housewife, trapped in a stale, loveless marriage. Her children are all grown up and she frequently talks to the wall in her kitchen while preparing her husband’s regular evening meal of egg and chips. When her best friend asks her to go to Greece with her for 2 weeks, Shirley jumps at the chance with a mix of exhilaration and jittery nerves. Leaving a note for her husband that simply reads “Gone to Greece--Back in two weeks”, Shirley leaves for her holiday. While relaxing on the beach, she rediscovers the woman she used to be and the happiness that she has been missing. Shirley embarks on a passionate affair with Costas, a local Greek man, and realizes that there is more to life than the dull, mundane existence she leads back home in Liverpool.
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April’s offering is the Tony Award Winner – Venus in Fur by David Ives.
A young playwright, Thomas, has written an adaptation of the 1870 novel Venus in Fur by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (after whom the term “masochism” was coined) At the end of a long day in which the actresses Thomas auditions fail to impress him, in walks Vanda, very late and seemingly clueless, but she convinces him to give her a chance. As they perform scenes from Thomas’s play, and Vanda the actor and Vanda the character gradually take control of the audition, the lines between writer, actor, director, and character begin to blur. Vanda is acting . . . or perhaps she sees in Thomas a masochist, one who desires fantasy in “real life” while writing fantasies for a living.
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Readers Theatre is our choice for May, with Paul Elliot’s, The Door.
A grandmother sits in her darkened apartment and refuses to answer the insistent knocking at her front door. In fact, this woman has shut herself off from everything except the one person still capable of reaching her, her teenage grandson, Justin. Now, he sits with her in the darkness, trying every trick he knows to get her to respond, to turn on the lights, to answer the door and reclaim her life. He teases. He torments. He goads. He reminds her that never once would she have let him hide away like this and he's not about to let her get away with it either. He pushes every annoying button he can push to finally get her to face her worst nightmare and what lies outside that door.
The Door is a play for theater companies that want to make a difference in their community, that wants to open the door and shed light on a very frightening truth: each year hundreds of our nation's youth are violently abused and murdered simply because someone questions their sexuality.
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Harvey Fierstein pens the piece we bring you in early June – Casa Valentina.
Nestled in the Catskills—1962’s land of dirty dancing and Borscht Belt comedy—an inconspicuous bungalow colony catered to a very special clientele: heterosexual men who delighted in dressing and acting as women. These white-collar professionals would discreetly escape their families to spend their weekends safely inhabiting their chosen female alter-egos. But given the opportunity to share their secret lives with the world, the members of this sorority had to decide whether the freedom gained by openness was worth the risk of personal ruin. Based on real events and infused with Fierstein’s trademark wit, this moving, insightful, and delightfully entertaining work offers a glimpse into the lives of a group of “self-made women” as they search for acceptance and happiness in their very own Garden of Eden.
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We’re back! Yes, that’s right, July sees the return of Puffs, or Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic by Matt Cox !
This popular piece was scheduled to be revived on a certain boy wizards birthday this year, but alas, the shut down had other ideas, so, we have moved it to next year. The New York Times proclaims PUFFS, “A FAST-PACED ROMP through the ‘Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic.’ For POTTERphiliacs who grew up alongside Potter and are eager to revisit that world, ‘PUFFS’ exudes a jovial, winking fondness for all things Harry!”
Many of the original cast will be returning!
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Our scary summer series continues in 2021 with our August offering – Dracula by Steven Dietz.
This adaptation by Dietz restores the suspense and seduction of Bram Stoker's classic novel to the stage. As Count Dracula begins to exert his will upon the residents of London, they try to piece together the clues of his appearances -in a valiant attempt to save themselves from a hideous fate. Rich with both humor and horror, this play paints a wickedly theatrical picture of Stoker's famous vampire.
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Keeping the horror going as fall begins to creep in, we bring you the two-person play, Turn of the Screw Adapted by James L. Seay from the Henry James novel.
A young Governess journeys to a lonely English manor house to care for two recently orphaned children. Before long, she learns she is not the children’s first governess and that her predecessor, along with her debauched lover, died under mysterious circumstances. She soon begins to feel evil Spector’s, whom she believes are tormenting the children in her care. At the same time, she, herself, is tortured by a frightening question: are the ghosts real, or are they the product of her own fevered imagination?
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It's Halloween, and time for us to bring you what we are known for, the scary, edge of your seat show that stays with you long after it’s over. We are going back to one of our earlier playwrights, Paul Elliot for this month's offering, with his play, Cries in the Night.
Neal and Vickie are a young couple who have lost their six-year-old son in a drowning accident and move to another state, another home, to try to start life over again. Unfortunately, they’re only in the new home a couple of nights before Vickie begins hearing a child crying in the darkness. Afraid she may be losing her mind; she keeps it a secret from her husband until one night he hears the crying as well. Frantically tearing the house apart, they try to find the source of the crying, hoping that maybe, just maybe it might be their son trying to reach them. The thought of him lost between life and death terrifies them, but once they do find the source, they discover something worse, much worse. Something Dark.
This is a play that examines the impact of early childhood experiences on our lives, and after-lives, all couched in a ghost story for the stage that will have audience members lifting their feet off the floor afraid of what’s crawling there.
Due to Covid19 mandates that change and shift, play titles may be subject to change, or shift in month.