Special Events

Hairspray: It’s 1962, and Baltimore teenager Tracy Turnblad lives in a world that tells her plus-sized gals shouldn’t be dancing on television and that racial segregation is here to stay. When she wins a spot on The Corny Collins Show, Tracy becomes a star and teams up with her friends Penny, Seaweed, Motormouth Maybelle and hunky Link Larkin to use her newfound fame to challenge the status quo. Director Christopher Liam Moore (The Book of Will, Shakespeare in Love) honors John Waters’ original subversive vision for the story in a wildly joyful production that celebrates radical inclusion at its heart.

As You Like It: Director Rosa Joshi (who helmed 2018’s widely praised Henry V) delves into the search for true love in a wondrous world of wit, transformation, and imagination. Exiled from the controlling confines of the court, Duke Senior and her daughter Rosalind seek refuge — and find much more — in the unconstrained Forest of Arden. Also fleeing danger at home, Orlando encounters a young man named Ganymede and seeks help in love — unaware that Ganymede is actually his heart’s desire, Rosalind, in disguise. “All the world’s a stage” and all society’s rules of conformity are off in this exuberant theatrical journey into one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies.

Mother Road: Inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, this world-premiere drama by Southern Oregon–based playwright Octavio Solis (El Paso Blue, Gibraltar, Quixote) finds hardworking and hard-living William Joad with no blood kin to inherit the family farm. No one, that is, until he finds an unexpected relation: Martín Jodes—a young Mexican-American man descended from Steinbeck’s protagonist Tom Joad. Directed by Bill Rauch in his last season as artistic director, this powerful story about land, family and survival inventively reverses the Joads’ mythic journey from California back to Oklahoma.

Destiny of Desire is a musical comedy based on the genre of the Mexican telenovela, or soap opera. A play filled with wicked and wonderful plot twists and turns, Destiny of Desire is a story of social ambition fraught with unexpected romantic trysts and outrageous epiphanies. It is a spectacularly funny romp into a world that has otherwise been confined to television.

Othello is Shakespeare's tragic story of inter-racial romance in 17th century Venice, featuring a forbidden relationship between a white, Venetian Senator's daughter and a black African warrior, who has been brought in as the general of the Venetian Army in the fight against the Ottoman empire. A play with endless contemporary applications about an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," Othello raises questions about our ongoing failure to accommodate difference on - and in - its own terms.

Manahatta, the Lenape Indian territory where contemporary Manhattan now stands, explores the disturbing relationship between the violent removal of Native Americans from their own land and modern day Wall Street, as the story of a Native American securities trader who finds herself torn between these two worlds. The plot alternates between the abuse of Native Americans in the 17th century and the practice of predatory lending that left millions of people without homes during the foreclosure crisis of the Great Recession, tracing a dramatic arc of dispossession throughout U.S. history.