WHAT’S ON IN 2027

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

“Next year’s plays, in their own way, are stories about legacy - about what we leave behind, and the stories we tell about the lives we have lived. Five of the seven main productions are comedies (yes, you read that right), but they are all comedies that reach beneath the laughter to ask a deeper question: How do I make my time on this planet meaningful, and what mark am I leaving on the world?

This question takes on many different forms throughout the season. In Dancing on the Elephant, laughter, mischief, and the spinning of wild tales become an antidote to regret as two elderly women reconcile with their pasts and form a friendship that becomes a new bedrock for meaning. Love Story follows a young protagonist who uses the rehearsal process to reclaim the narrative of her own life, after it was cut all too short. In The Shoe, characters who peek up at life from unusual angles must figure out how to write their own stories in a world that doesn’t provide a blueprint for them. And in The Last Days of Jude, the ordinary busyness of life falls away when time is suspended between life and death, revealing what truly matters.

Sometimes the inherited stories that others impose on us can shape our lives as profoundly as the ones we write for ourselves. An Ordinary Afternoon in 1974 explores two women confronting the narratives shaped by the expectations placed on women of their time, while The Last Hanging at Redbridge shows how inventing, embellishing, and passing down stories can become a way of reclaiming power in the face of the legal machinery of the ruling elite in the 1800s. And in Ruby and the Reindeer, a woman must decide whether to step into her inherited role, and what kind of mark she might leave on the world if she does. All of these characters, like us, are on a journey to create their own personal myths: to make meaning, to understand themselves, and to understand the mark they are leaving on the world.

I hope these plays make you laugh and make you feel. And I hope you leave the theatre feeling a little more awake to life, and perhaps a little more curious about the story you are writing with your own.”

Fiona Mongillo, Artistic Director