2023-2024 Season Overview
Trinity Theatre offers experiences for everyone with its 2023-24 season! We start with our annual Open Mic Night, featuring the talents of students from across campus. Our main stage productions kick off with a comic sequel to an Ibsen classic, followed by an award-winning musical-comedy. Our spring term opens with one of the greatest of Greek tragedies, while an innovative feminist dramedy rounds out the season. Additionally, our Student Lab Series offers performances completely produced by students. Trinity Theatre showcases its commitment to a holistic approach to theatre-making through works that challenge our students and entertain our audiences.
Trinity Theatre Open Mic Night
September 9, 2023 | Stieren Theater
Trinity Theatre Open Mic Night is an opportunity for any member of the Trinity community to share their talent on stage at the Stieren Theatre. Sing a song, recite a poem, perform a monologue, do some stand-up comedy, anything goes! More information about signing up for a time slot will be available on LeeRoy. Any questions, contact Dr. Nathan Stith
"A Doll’s House, Part 2"
September 29 – October 1, October 5 – 8, 2023 | Attic Theatre
By Lucas Hnath
Directed by Dr. Stacey Connelly
Henrik Ibsen's 1879 masterpiece A Doll's House ends with Nora Helmer's shocking decision to leave her husband and children for a life on her own. This climactic event--when Nora slams the door on everything in her life--instantly propelled world drama into the modern age. In A Doll's House, Part 2, years have passed. There is a knock on that same door. Nora is back. But why? "[A] smart, funny, and utterly engrossing play." (The New York Times).
"The Prom"
November 3-5, 8-11, 2023 | Stieren Theatre
Music by Matthew Sklar
Lyrics by Chad Beguelin
Libretto by Bob Martin & Chad Beguelin
Directed by Dr. Nathan Stith
Four eccentric and washed-up Broadway stars decide they need to re-brand themselves as “celebrity activists!” They stumble upon a news article about a high school prom that was canceled when one of the students wanted to bring her girlfriend as her date. On a mission to “change lives,” the Broadway divas rush to Edgewater, Indiana, only to find their own lives changed as much as those of the people they meet there. This 2019 Drama Desk Winner for Outstanding Musical is a big, campy, classic musical with a modern message of inclusivity and acceptance.
“Agamemnon”
February 16-18, 21-24, 2024 | Stieren Theatre
By Aeschylus
Translated by Dr. Thomas Jenkins
Directed by Dr. Kyle Gillette
In the first tragedy of Aeschylus’ foundational trilogy The Oresteia the king Agamemnon arrives home triumphant after Greek armies conquer Troy, slaughter its citizens and desecrate the city’s temples. The royal Trojan priestess Cassandra, captured and enslaved as Agamemnon’s concubine, is cursed by the god Apollo to see the House of Atreus’ terrible future but to find no one who will believe her prophecy. As she and a chorus of old men helplessly watch the plot unfold, the queen Clytemnestra, seething from her husband’s sacrifice of their daughter, orchestrates her bloody revenge. Featuring a brand new translation by Trinity Classics Professor, Dr. Thomas Jenkins.
Stieren Guest Artists: Bread and Puppet Theatre
March 1-3, 2024 | Stieren Theater
Bread and Puppet is one of the oldest, nonprofit, political theatre companies in the U.S. The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of the neighborhood. More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners. The puppets grew bigger and bigger.
In 1974 Bread and Puppet moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The 140-year old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets.
The traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company, to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers.
“Fefu and Her Friends”
April 12-14, 17-20, 2024 | Stieren Theatre
By Maria Irene Fornés
Directed by Dr. Rachel Joseph
Innovative and groundbreaking, Fefu and Her Friends, written by influential Cuban American playwright Maria Irene Fornés, has been praised as "funny and shocking…the dramatic equivalent of a collection of poems… Seven friends gather at Fefu’s house for a kind of reunion… exploring lives and quite specifically the pain, strain, comforts, and fragility of women’s lives… After the initial scene in the living room, we are divided into four groups and visit the kitchen, a bedroom, and a garden in each of which some particular encounter takes place… The actors perform the same thing four times so that we all have a chance to see them… An engaging kind of activity… There are moments of splendor.” —Richard Eder, reviewing the original 1978 production, The New York Times.
