Announcing the 2024-2025 Production Season!

A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival

September 20 & 21 at 7:30 pm • A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre
For nearly 30 years, the Performing Arts Department has produced the A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival as a vehicle to support and develop new plays written by WashU students. The annual Festival begins with a university-wide solicitation of new, unproduced plays. Several plays are selected, through an anonymized screening process, to be developed in a two-week event in September. During those two weeks, each play will be workshopped with a professional dramaturg, a faculty director and student cast. The Festival culminates in a public staged reading of each play. Assistant Professor Zachariah Ezer will serve as Festival dramaturg in September 2024. 
 

Pride and Prejudice

By Kate Hamill • Directed by William Whitaker
October 25 & 26, November 1 & 2, at 7:30 pm • October 27 & November 3 at 2 pm • Edison Theatre
Kate Hamill's reimagining of the Jane Austen classic is a brilliant comedic romp with an irreverent soul. Here, love is a game with winners and losers everywhere, and ludicrous circumstances abound and surround all matters of the heart. Finding a soulmate is serious play and true love is a madcap ordeal with confounding rules but a huge payoff.  Right on time for Parents and Family Weekend 2024!
 

The Thanksgiving Play

By Larissa FastHorse
Directed by Andrea Urice
November 21, 22 & 23 at 7:30 pm, November 23 & 24 at 2 pm • A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre
A small group of abundantly earnest teaching artists devise a Thanksgiving pageant that attempts to celebrate both Turkey Day and Native American Heritage Month. While striving to be culturally sensitive, the angst-ridden thespians find themselves wrestling with history, myth, and their own biases as they descend into a hilarious cornucopia of political correctness.  In The Thanksgiving Play, Larissa FastHorse, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, has written what she calls a "comedy in a satire" with "a little bit of medicine that's going to go down with the laughs". 

 

Washington University Dance Theatre: It's Time

Artistic Direction by David Marchant
December 6 & 7 at 7:30 pm, December 8 at 2 pm • Edison Theatre
Dance is understood as a temporal art form, each movement capturing the present moment while gesturing toward the past and future. Philosophically, the ephemerality of dance art work speaks to the often disquieting nature of our transient existence, emphasizing the fleeting beauty and immediacy of the performative act.  

It’s Time, this year’s installment of the Performing Arts Department’s annual fall dance concert explores the relationship between temporality and dance, posing the question “What is it time for?”—in dance, art, history, culture and society. This annual concert dance showcase features diverse and creative choreography by resident and guest artists, performed by select student dancers of the Performing Arts Department. 
 

The Wolves

By Sarah DeLappe
Directed by Annamaria Pileggi
February 21, 22, & 28, March 1 at 7:30 pm, February 23 and March 2 at 2 pm • Edison Theatre
The Wolves, by Sarah DeLappe, is a 21st century coming-of-age tale. A finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the play offers a glimpse into the lives of nine teenage girls who are teammates on an indoor soccer team. In a series of scenes depicting their pre-game warm-up routine, the girls engage in seeming frivolous banter, but under the surface, they are vying for power, understanding, and acceptance as they figure out their place in a changing world. 

 

2025 MFA Student Dance Concert

Artistic Direction by Ellie Harrison
March 21 & 22 at 7:30 pm • Edison Theatre
Our 8th MFA Dance Concert, ¿Te puedo contar algo?, showcases original dance works crafted by our MFA candidates, Tess Angelica Losada Miner and Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón. With exclusively female ensembles, these choreographers will use dance to illuminate various facets of the diasporic experience. Losada Miner delves into themes of exile, lamentation, and longing, pondering what it is to mourn for a lost homeland. Meanwhile, Santiago Lebrón dissects notions of abundance and scarcity through a sequence of interlinked vignettes. Join us for an unforgettable evening of dance. 
 

WUDance Collective: Transcendence

Artistic Direction by Cecil Slaughter & Ryadah Heiskell
April 4 & 5 at 7:30 pm • Edison Theatre
Transcendence explores the ability to push past the norm and, through our own efforts or a nudge from something outside of ourselves, heighten our mundane experience beyond familiar comfort. Through a blend of contemporary and avant-garde choreography, Transcendence pushes boundaries, questions limits, and reaches beyond the expected. Join us for an evening of performance where movement breaks through the margins of the physical world as we ask: How do you respond to limits? Compliance or rebellion?
 

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

Book by Rachel Sheinkin • Music & Lyrics by William Finn
Directed by Brenna Jones (Performing Arts Department Alum)
April 17, 18, & 19 at 7:30pm, April 19 & 20 at 2pm • A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre
It's time for the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and six contestants are poised to out-spell the rest. These six adolescents are the brightest and best, and the only thing they fear is the "ding" of the bell...and maybe some other things too. With four audience participant spots to fill, you might even get the chance to prove yourself as Putnam County's champion speller.  

Performing Arts Department Alum Brenna Jones (Class of 2023) will be returning to campus to direct this lighthearted musical with quick remarks and even quicker definitions. 

 

Tickets go on sale August 26th!