Current Season
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Fall 2022
Fellowship
By Sam Chanse
September 29–October 8, 2022
A group of young, college-age activists are thrown together on an internship for a venerable community social justice organization. Defeating an evil ballot proposition is their goal. But first they may need to face the charismatic leader of the organization, their own ideas of privilege and identity, and even the house in which they work and its haunted history...This is a play about what it means to have fellowship: with an idea, with each other, and with your Self. The UR International Theatre Program presents the world premiere of a newly commissioned work for the theatre from award-winning playwright, Sam Chanse. Funded by alumna, Natalie Hurst ‘74, and developed over the course of the Fall ’19 semester with students and director, Nigel Maister, Chanse’s play becomes the 5th new work commissioned as part of this groundbreaking initiative.
GalleryThe Crucible
By Arthur Miller
December 1–10, 2022
Arthur Miller’s searing modern masterpiece is commonly considered a response to the “red scare” and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee activities. But the portrayal of a community riven by misinformation and superstition, conspiracies, intolerance, and deceit—both internal and external—resonate forcefully in 21st century America. When accusations of witchcraft spread like a viral scourge through 17th Century Salem, MA, no one remains immune. Friends turn on friends; neighbor on neighbor; lovers on beloveds; husbands on wives; servants on masters. Innuendo, rumor, and hearsay become accepted “truth” when propped up by the religious and political powers that stand to gain from them. Miller’s magnificent achievement is to distill history, politics, and religion into a single devastating portrait of a flawed, deeply human individual trying to save his marriage, his soul, and his name in the face of a world that has lost its center and its senses.
GallerySpring 2023
The African Company Presents Richard III
By Carlyle Brown
February 23–March 4, 2023
It’s 1821, before the emancipation proclamation and long before the right to vote, and a group of African American actors in New York City are putting on plays that thrill audiences both black and white. But when the company decides to stage its own production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, it sets itself on a collision course with an fancy, white company doing the same work, prompting questions of “who owns Shakespeare?” and, indeed: how can Shakespeare best speak to all people across the centuries? Carlyle Brown’s hugely entertaining and iconic The African Company Presents Richard III—based on true events—not only sheds light on this under-celebrated and little-known moment of history, but asks provocative questions about the nature of existence and performance, ownership and identity, culture and appropriation, and whether oppressed people who have, daily, to “pass” in a hostile society, are not, perhaps, the greatest actors of us all.
GalleryMetamorphoses
By Mary Zimmerman
April 20–29, 2023
Based on one of the great texts of Western civilization, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, visual magician and director Mary Zimmerman created her own contemporary version of this classic text. Centered around a pool of water, Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses examines the myths that define us. She shows how acts of creation and destruction, invention and dissolution, memory and forgetting, love and loss, all center around the transmutation of one physical, emotional, or spiritual state into another, and how the notion of metamorphosis is central to the formation of order from chaos. With contemporary language, humor, and startling visual originality, Zimmermann’s Metamorphoses gives us a refreshing, deeper theatrical insight into what is to be truly human.
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