2025-2026 Season Overview
Trinity Theatre’s 2025-26 main stage season brings you four contemporary works dramatizing urgent social issues across the globe and beneath it – the crisis of undocumented people in our communities; the rise of the Third Reich in 1930s Berlin; an avant-garde critique of life in modern China, and a meditation on our place in the natural world. The annual Open Mic Night showcases the talents of students from across campus, and our Student Lab Series offers performances completely produced by students throughout the school year. Trinity Theatre showcases its commitment to a holistic approach to theatre-making through works that challenge our students and entertain our audiences.
"SANCTUARY CITY"
October 3 - 5 & 8 - 11, 2025 | Attic Theatre
Directed by Prof. Roberto Prestigiacomo
Sanctuary City by Martyna Majok is a raw and urgent story of two undocumented teenagers fighting for love, safety, and a future in a country that promises protection, but often fails to deliver it. Set in post-9/11 Newark, the play unfolds through nonlinear moments within a nondeterministic reality, capturing the disorientation and uncertainty of lives lived in the in-between spaces of contemporary society. In this production, shaped by the ProbabilisticStages approach, Sanctuary City becomes a live system of shifting meaning, where every gesture, pause, and presence creates new emotional realities in the moment of performance. The stage is stripped of superimposed meaning and becomes a charged field of possibility. Here, meaning is not prescripted; it emerges, collapses, and re-forms in real time—a theatre of discovery, not repetition.
"GRAFTING, ROOTING, GROWING"
2:00pm, October 25, 2025 | Attic Theatre
Written and performed by Leah Woehr ('20)
Trinity alum Leah Ai Ling Woehr (’20) will present a performance piece she developed during her graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The piece, recently performed at the FLIPT Festival in Italy, is titled Grafting, Rooting, Growing. It is an autoethnographic solo performance that explores Chinese transnational adoption and Chinese-American identity. In this piece, Leah interweaves family stories, music, and personal reflection as she works through understanding how her daughterhood was performed into being and how this affects her sense of self. She then places her own narrative in conversation with other Chinese adoptees to demonstrate the communal relationship between their experiences and how this contributes to the larger Asian American diaspora. The 40-minute solo performance will be followed by a talkback.
"CABARET"
November 7 - 9 & 12 - 15, 2025 | Stieren Theatre
Directed by Dr. Nathan Stith, music direction by Dr. James Worman
Willkommen! Originally produced on Broadway in 1966 and updated in a 1998 revival, Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret explores the dark and tumultuous lives of Berlin’s natives and expatriates as Germany slowly yields to the emerging Third Reich. The story follows two couples: Clifford Bradshaw, an American writer who falls for British cabaret performer Sally Bowles; and Fraulein Schneider, a boarding house proprietor, who begins a romance with Herr Schultz, a mild-mannered fruit seller who happens to be Jewish. Meanwhile, the Emcee at the hedonistic Kit Kat Klub invites the audience to forget their troubles because “life is a cabaret, old chum!”
Trinity Theatre Open Mic Night
November 20, 2025 | 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
"THE BUS STOP"
February 20 - 22 & 25 - 28, 2026 | Stieren Theater
Directed by Dr. Chloë Edmonson
Set at a bus stop in a city suburb, The Bus Stop by Gao Xingjian centers on a group of people waiting for a bus that never arrives. Often hilarious and sometimes profound, the characters’ interactions and personal revelations also serve as critiques of societal stagnation and the human condition. The play's absurdist elements and its critical perspective on social issues led to its ban in mainland China shortly after its premiere in 1983. Often compared to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, this thought-provoking work remains influential in the history of avant-garde theatre.
"NOT EVERY MOUNTAIN"
April 22 - 26, 2026 | Stieren Theater
Created and presented by Stieren Guest Artists Rude Mechs as part of the Stieren Arts Enrichment Series
Not Every Mountain is a mellow meditation on change, permanence, and our place in the natural world. It is a presentation of the life cycle of mountains and the processes by which they are born and eventually laid to rest, an invocation of tectonic force and geologic time. Using string, cardboard, and magnets, Not Every Mountain invites us to watch the collective effort of making and unmaking a series of interlocking mountain ranges. We watch minutes, or perhaps centuries, unfold, as mountains rise and fall, clouds dance, birds alight and depart, and a moon delicately hangs overhead. Not Every Mountain is a joyous and poignant meditation on the fleetingness of time and the many lives of minerals, underscored by a poetic recitation–or perhaps a spiritual incantation.
Rude Mechs is an ensemble-based theatre company that operates with a full company of 33 members. We create original plays that we produce in Austin, TX. We have received over 200 local and national awards and nominations for our work. We’ve enjoyed four Off-Broadway premieres and toured to top national venues such as The Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN), The Wexner Center (Columbus, OH), and Woolly Mammoth (Washington D.C.). We seek to participate in the international community of artists by contributing to festivals such Austria’s SommerSzene, the Galway Arts Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (winner Total Theatre Award for Best New Play by an Ensemble), the Kiasma Festival, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, and the Under the Radar Festival in NYC. Use this link to read Rude Mechs full mission and history.