2022-2023 Season

In this dramatic work by Lee Blessing, three generations of highly intelligent and freethinking women attempt to reconcile years of family dysfunction. Dorothea was a repressed housewife and mother of three sons and a daughter, Artemis (Artie), whom she favored. She discovered that being an eccentric suited her perfectly and spent a lifetime thrusting her wild ideas and beliefs onto an unappreciative and doubting Artemis. Artemis ran away from Dorothea as soon as she could and kept on the move until she married and had a daughter of her own. She named her Barbara, but Dorothea renamed the child Echo and began to teach her everything from Ancient Greek to calculus. What Echo loves most is words and spelling. The title of the show comes from the winning word that Echo spelled correctly at the National Spelling Bee. The play jumps backward and forward in time. As one character relives a memory, the other two play themselves as they were during that time. In one memory, Echo portrays herself as a three-month-old. At the beginning of the play, Dorothea has suffered a stroke and is bedridden and catatonic for several scenes. Throughout the play, however, she takes part in her memories and then transitions back to the present, trapped in her minimally responsive body. The director and actors in Eleemosynary have the challenge of making these memory scenes feel authentic with smooth transitions and blocking.

On the occasion of Freddy's funeral and at his behest, six of his friends gather at the home of Hank and Kate in Kansas City, where five of them grew up. Hank and Kate were childhood sweethearts whose apparently idyllic relationship has proceeded uninterrupted through the years. Andy and Nessa were childhood sweethearts also, but are now divorced and living in New York. He's a successful advertising executive; she's the author of a bestselling roman à clef based on her friends' lives. Paul is the new Undersecretary for Eastern Affairs in Washington, and his wife, Alice, the only one who has not known the others since grammar school, is a housewife obsessed with the many infidelities she imagines Paul has committed. Hovering over them all is the spirit of Freddy, the only admitted homosexual in the group. As the liquor flows and memories (and recriminations) become more telling, Hank, in an emotional outburst, admits that he had been having an affair with Freddy for years prior to his death. Kate is overwhelmed by this revelation, the friends take sides and, as the night winds down into morning, facades are stripped away as no-holds-barred truth-telling replaces the party atmosphere with which the evening began. In the end Hank and Kate agree to strive for a more honest relationship, and the others, each in his or her own way affected by the absent Freddy, resolve to use the legacy of directness and honesty which he left them to set their own lives on firmer paths.

The autobiographical musical by Jonathan Larson, who revolutionized theater as the creator of Rent. The show follows Jon, a young theater composer who's waiting tables at a New York City diner in 1990 while writing what he hopes will be the next great American musical. Days before he's due to showcase his work in a make-or-break performance, Jon is feeling the pressure from everywhere: from his girlfriend Susan, who dreams of an artistic life beyond New York City; from his friend Michael, who has moved on from his dream to a life of financial security; amidst an artistic community being ravaged by the AIDS epidemic. With the clock ticking, Jon is at a crossroads and faces the question everyone must reckon with: What are we meant to do with the time we have? tick, tick...BOOM!

What do you do when you're a Classics professor at one of the greatest universities in America and find a long lost manuscript by Euripides that will make you famous throughout the world? You lose it, of course. And then you call on the Ancient Greek Gods of Comedy to get you out of the mess. For young professor Daphne Rain, the first surprise is that the gods show up. And the second surprise is that any two people - even if they are gods - can wreak so much havoc on one university. The Ivy League will never be the same as a pair of screwball deities encounters the carnal complexity of college coeds, campus capers, and conspicuous consumption.

The sharp-edged but charming play takes place on and around a park bench in Central Park where two elderly men - one black and one white - with nothing in common but their spirited resistance to having others decide for them when they no longer count. Together, but each, in his own unique way, they fight those who would put them out to pasture, developing throughout a true, albeit unusual friendship.

As the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta draws near, all is not well: Hermia and Lysander wish to wed, but Hermia's father wants her to marry Demetrius. Furthermore, Hermia's best friend Helena is in love with Demetrius, but he only has eyes for Hermia. The young lovers flee into the woods hoping to escape their problems, only to be followed by Helena and Demetrius, and all four of them find themselves in the crossfire of the discord between the king and queen of the fairies. Throw in a group of blue-collar workmen trying to mount a play for Theseus and Hippolyta, and you have Shakespeare's classic tale of love, betrayal, and forgiveness.