Summer Production!
Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury
The Department of Theatre Arts is excited to be partnering with Tacoma’s empathos theatre company to produce Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Fairview. Fairview, a challenging play about contemporary Black experience, will be directed by empathos Artistic Director Chung with a cast and design team drawn from local theatre professionals and students. Fairview inventively presents the dilemmas of race, perception, and representation. In the play, one family’s birthday celebration for their matriarch becomes the occasion for appropriation by characters who want the satisfaction of stereotypes. The violence at the heart of racialized imaginations emerges in theatrical ways. How do the things we watch on television and movies make us think we know about marginalization and identity? Who is playing what roles? Who is watching and being watched? What happens when we change our vantage point?
Performances in the Norton Clapp Theatre in Jones Hall
June 7, 8, 14, and 15 at 7:30pm and June 9 and 16 at 2:30pm.
Free Admission (donation accepted)
2024-25 Theatre Arts Mainstage Season
Fall Mainstage
The Importance of Being Earnest
By Oscar Wilde
Directed by Sara Freeman
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s dazzling comedy of manners, wonders if finding out that you are who you have been pretending to be is an absolute triumph or total disaster. Jack and Algernon juggle their country lives and city lives as befits elegant young gentlemen. But they haven’t really reckoned with the wit and skill of Gwendolyn and Cicely, who know the value of having a sensational diary and want the veneration aristocratic young ladies must certainly deserve. A perennial favorite of the English-speaking stage, this show is a wonderful period piece that is also full of constantly renewing insight about the farce and pathos of gender norms, social roles, and self-knowledge. Let’s have both freeing love matches and high tea!
Performances: Oct 25 - Nov 2, 2024
Directors' Lab Festival of Scenes in December (Program/Dates TBA)
Spring Mainstage
The Oresteia
By Ellen McLaughlin
Adapted from the trilogy by Aeschylus
Translated by Ellen McLaughlin
Directed by Jess K Smith
In this fast, fresh, and feminist adaptation of Aeschylus’s ancient trilogy of plays, Ellen McLuaghlin invites us to question what justice looks like in action. In The Oresteia each member of a family enacts a kind of violence intended to right a wrong. Instead, violence perpetuates violence and a cycle of harm makes each person “morally unrecognizable” even to themselves. Drawing inspiration from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this play grapples with not just how a cycle occurs, but how it affects and mobilizes a community to move beyond punitive judgment and individual blame toward the complexities of repair. In this timely re-telling of an ancient story, we are left to consider the nature of justice and a community’s role in healing from harm.
Performances: February 28 - March 8, 2025