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Current Season (2024-2025)

Spring 2025

fox toss poster

Spring 2025

Fox Toss

by Zuzanna Szadkowski
Directed by Alice Reagan
March 6-8, 2025


Director’s and Playwright’s Statement

For the fifth cycle of New Plays at Barnard, the Theatre department has commissioned actor and playwright Zuzanna Szadkowski (Barnard ‘01) to write a play for our students. Through two workshops in fall 2024 and several drafts, Zuzanna is writing an incredibly funny, heartbreaking, sometimes shocking play called Fox Toss. From the initial proposal: 

“Augustus the Strong (1670-1733) was a fabled king of Poland who proudly exhibited his Herculean strength by bending horseshoes with his bare hands and tossing live animals for distance. He was rumored to have sired 360 bastards with his many fantastic mistresses. He was a huge and hugely charismatic sex maniac with a soft spot for fine porcelain. In fact, he imprisoned a promising alchemist in the hopes that the man could divine a means of producing porcelain better than Chinese china. Augustus was sort of cool and really awful at the same time: a shitty dad to rival all shitty dads. Today is the day of the annual fox toss, and also the day his most indomitable bastard, Anna, comes knocking. 

The play asks: Does my family know me, see me, understand me? Am I my parents? What do I deserve from my loved ones? What am I willing to accept? And what does it mean to be self-made? This is a comedy about desperately wanting to have it out with what makes you up.”

Fox Toss has a big heart, and will make big demands: scenically, comedically, and emotionally. I’m thrilled students will have the opportunity to work on a new piece with a playwright in the rehearsal room. We’ll follow Zuzanna as she leads us to the distant past with this hilarious, whip smart play that actually feels too close for comfort.

Tickets

  • $12 general admission
  • $6 with BC/CUID

Performances

Thesis I 25 poster

Thesis Festival I

April 24-26, 2025

365 Days / 365 Plays
by Suzan-Lori Parks
Directed by Sahmaya Busby

On November 13, 2002, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks began 365 Days / 365 Plays, an anthology of plays written for each day of the calendar year. Coincidentally, I was born on that exact day. Together, this play and I entered and remain in a world of political and social instability and two shaken societies plagued by wars and injustices fought at home and abroad. We’ve become accustomed to tragedy in an unnatural manner, with devastating news passing our screens for maybe some hours before the next appears. In a society with droning sadness and grief, we often question the felt-yet-unseen impact that tragedy may have on us. Do we become accustomed to it and adopt it as a facet of life, or do we find ways to resist becoming one with it by insisting on our humanity? Throughout her literary canon, Parks emphasizes the role of American history in shaping who we are and how we respond to and live with each other.


Thursday, 4/24, 9pm
Friday, 4/25, 7pm
Saturday, 4/26, 8pm

Antigone
by Sophocles, adapted by Jean Anouilh, translated by Lewis Galantière
Directed by Mikayla Gold Benson

Thebes is in ruins—cursed, polluted, and shattered by civil war. In its aftermath, Antigone, living out her family’s polluted legacy, makes a choice and does not waver. 


Antigone is an old story, but she herself is young. This play is about rebellion and grief. It exposes the moral and mortal tradeoffs of a world where no one truly wins. The consequences unfold in a single day, in a single forum with 7 entrances and 7 people. Antigone’s all-female cast arrives out of a yearning to witness and share the lamentations of this present moment. 


We bring Antigone to you, honoring a moment to grieve for those unburied, as we are rightfully haunted by the mortalities of a global and local scale that precede the play as well as those ongoing amid this production’s performances. We are here together witnessing tragedy because we all play a part in it. The choices we make matter, as does the distance we place between ourselves and this story. The more we disengage from it, the more dangerous we become.

Thursday, 4/24, 7pm
Friday, 4/25, 8pm
Saturday, 4/26, 9pm

A People
by LM Feldman
Directed by Is Perlman 
Dramaturgy by Olivia Shuman

A People opens on the cusp of a world about to begin. It’s mostly empty, fairly dark, and largely silent.  A gust of wind blows, and with it—whispers of music and prayer. From silence and darkness a group of people is formed, composed of fire, music, dance, and cloth. These people emerge buzzing with vitality—they stomp, sing wordless melodies, and hold tight onto each other’s hands as a shared lifeforce pulses in them and through them. Another gust of wind scatters them across the globe, dispersing them like pollen and leaving them humming fragments of melodies they once knew by heart. They spend the next 4,000 or so years trying to figure out how to translate this lifeforce into rituals and texts. They call it Judaism. They connect. They argue. They pray and they reckon and they denounce and they dance and sing and light candles. The cracks begin to show, but so does the alchemy of human touch and song. 

Together, we will ask: how can we both honor and challenge the histories and practices that we inherit? How do we tell stories about our ancestors, and what do we ask of them? And what possibilities of radical change and becoming do each of our bodies hold? 

Thursday, 4/24, 8pm
Friday, 4/25, 9pm 
Saturday, 4/26, 7pm

*Saturday's performance of A People will be captioned.

Thesis II poster

Thesis Festival II

May 2-3, 2025

Please join us for the final weekend of the Theatre Department's Senior Thesis Festival!
Senior Theatre majors will present new research and play readings, and perform original solo works Friday, 5/2 and Saturday, 5/3.

All events are free!

Please note that each event is ticketed separately. 
All events are in the Minor Latham Playhouse (Milbank 118) unless otherwise noted. 

FRIDAY, MAY 2, 2025: 

11:30 AM | RESEARCH PRESENTATION (328 Milbank) — TICKETS
"Drag Kingdom Lives! A Revolutionary Performance Scene in New York City," Ruby Leib

1 PM | PLAY READING
Alliance by Brooks Gillespie — TICKETS

2 PM | PLAY READING
The Things We Hold Onto by Allison Letterman — TICKETS

3 PM | PLAY READING
GHOSTED by Stephanie Bandura — TICKETS

5 PM | SOLO PERFORMANCES — TICKETS

*Talkback to follow

Weaving Blood by Julia Cassinelli
The Curse of the Uppsala Kings by Liam Forest
Secret Recipe by Dakki Ji
Within Sight by Aden Karp
La Santera Curandera by Bailey Stephen

7PM | RECEPTION (229 MILBANK) 
All seniors in the theatre major are encouraged to attend a reception celebrating the culmination of the thesis process! 


SATURDAY, MAY 3, 2024:

1 PM | PLAY READING
Snoopy Stands on her Head until She Sees the Stars by Tess Inderbitzin — TICKETS

2 PM | PLAY READING
The Bitter Bloom of Serenity by Zhamina Aaliyah — TICKETS

3 PM | PLAY READING
Promising Young Woman by Angel Qiao — TICKETS

4 PM | PLAY READING
American Girl/די אַמעריקאַנערין by Lonnie Miller — TICKETS

6PM | SOLO PERFORMANCES — TICKETS

Weaving Blood by Julia Cassinelli
The Curse of the Uppsala Kings by Liam Forest
Secret Recipe by Dakki Ji
Within Sight by Aden Karp
La Santera Curandera by Bailey Stephen

Research Advisor Shayoni Mitra
Playwriting Advisor Andy Bragen
Solo Performance Advisor Kyle deCamp

Fall 2024

Trouble in Mind poster

Fall 2024

Trouble in Mind

by Alice Childress
Directed by Dara Malina
October 17-19, 2024

Director's Statement: 

A challenging play with a sense of humor and tragedy, Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress explores racism, sexism and hierarchy inside of a Broadway rehearsal room in 1957. 

Written in response to the lack of quality acting roles for Black women, Alice Childress set out to write a play featuring the story of a middle-aged Black actress, Wiletta Mayer. In Trouble in Mind, we see Wiletta navigating the injustices of the rehearsal process for the so-called “anti-lynching” drama, Chaos in Belleville, directed by Al Manners, a white director.

The play is set against the socio-political climate of the late 1950s referencing major events in the history of Civil Rights such as the Little Rock School Desegregation in 1957 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56. 

Famously, this play was set to be the first play written by a Black woman on Broadway. When Alice Childress refused to change the ending of her play to satisfy the white producers, the play did not make it to Broadway that year and did not have it’s Broadway debut until 2021. 

Just like Alice Childress, we see Wiletta risk a professional opportunity and challenge the system when she speaks her mind, and unveils the structure for what it really is…

In working with the company of Barnard students and professional artists, we are utilizing our rehearsal space as a laboratory for discussion and dramaturgical investigation while learning how to navigate this play together. We are asking, what does it mean to work on and present this play today at Barnard/Columbia in 2024?

 

Tickets

  • $12 general admission
  • $6 with BC/CUID

Performances

Three Sisters poster

Three Sisters

by Anton Chekhov; Translated by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Gisela Cardenas
November 21-23, 2024

Director's Statement
Three Sisters, or we will never go back to Moscow

Three Sisters is a play about fantasy and witnessing that fantasy shattered once we become aware of the natural progression of life to its end. As a doctor, Chekhov knew that there is only one thing in life common to us all: we are born, and every day, we walk towards our death. There are no second chances. Because of this, his work has frequently been mistakenly labeled as pessimistic. Quite different from such a vision, I stand with Chekohv in experiencing the natural human progression toward death as a vital clock reminding us of every moment's uniqueness. We must live aware of the present, aware and connected to others around us.

Dreams are essential to propel our actions and, consequently, life forward. They are a beacon to guide our choices. But what happens when those dreams become so solid that they end up being a mirage, arresting us into waiting for a stagnant image of the future? What happens when, in the name of that fantasy, we stop seeing the present, the people we cohabit with, and do not do something specific to attain or change that dream? What happens when that dream, the Moscow of our play, becomes an empty prayer that, like a slogan in a commercial, hangs over our present, obliterating any possibility of seeing where we are and how we can change?

Time in Three Sisters is simultaneously static and hectic. Life and its minutiae unfold as the acts go by, but the underlying status of its protagonists remains unchanged, only to shatter their desires in the last act. Left alone, with no home, no friends, and a series of failed decisions, our characters will remain on stage unarmed, clinging to the hope of understanding one day what happened.

Are we a community of avid thinkers living the life that belongs to us? Are we letting our dreams turn into rigid fantasies, to be shattered one day when the clock has gone around and is about to stop? We must remember that we are never going back to Moscow. Moscow is the present.

Doing Three Sisters with Barnard and Columbia students is a gift, not only because of the fabulous energy that working with more than twenty students between cast and crew brings but mostly because it is a privilege to explore these ideas in a world torn by the rising violence and ideological rigidity that obliterates the possibility of cohabiting with each other on the same stage.

I am deeply thankful first to my students, whose hours of work, questions, ideas, and research have made this show possible. Then, to the Design and Production team, who have put so much effort into making this show happen.  Enjoy the show!

Tickets

  • $12 general admission
  • $6 with BC/CUID

Performances

2024-2025 Events

Is Theatre Dying?

A talk by Chinese director Wang Chong

In conversation with Yizhou Huang (Assistant Professor of Theatre, Barnard College)

Monday, February 3, 6-8 pm / Sulzberger Parlor, Barnard Hall

Sponsored by Dasha Epstein Visiting Scholars and Artists Fund

Open to the public, registration required

Wang Chong 王翀 is the founder of Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental, a Beijing-based performance group. He is the most internationally commissioned Chinese theater director, with his works performed in over 20 countries. Wang’s notable productions include The Warfare of Landmine 2.0 (2013 Festival/Tokyo Award), Lu Xun (2016 The Beijing News Best Chinese Performance), Teahouse 2.0 (2018 One Drama Awards Best Little Theater Work), Waiting for Godot (a live online performance with an audience of 290,000), and Made in China 2.0 (touring 5 continents). Since 2022, he has embraced a global nomad lifestyle.

Note to attendees: Barnard College's campus security policy requires pre-registration for all non-ID holders. Photo ID and registration confirmation must be presented to security guards for entrance.

‘Maati Katha’ (Earth Stories)

Performed by Choiti Ghosh, with Abhisar Bose, and Mohammad Shameem 

Followed by a discussion with Choiti Ghosh, Shayoni Mitra (Barnard), and Sufia Uddin (Connecticut)

Time:  Wednesday, February 5, 6:00pm - 8:00pm, followed by a reception

Location:  Glicker Milstein Theatre, Diana Center, Barnard College

Sponsored by the South Asia Institute, the Glicker-Milstein Theatre, and the Dasha Epstein Visiting Scholars and Artists Fund, Department of Theatre, Barnard College

Campus Map

Registration required to attend - click here.  Valid Barnard or Columbia ID, or for non-affiliates,Photo ID and QR code with registration confirmation must be presented to security guards for entrance.

SYNOPSIS

In the dangerous and magical land of Sunderbans – the vast forested delta area in West Bengal (eastern India) and Bangladesh where great rivers combine and split before merging into the Bay of Bengal, a region of extreme ecological and environmental vulnerability - living is about a fragile balance between land and water, forest and field, domestic and wild, human and human, human and non-human, calm and storm. As each stakes claim, as each encroaches upon the other’s space, how does life manage?

Stories and beliefs form essential anchors for the people of the Sunderban, with the ‘Bonbibi’ legend looming large in the popular imagination. Bonbibi is said to have come to the ‘Land of the 18 Tides’ to help the people, the tigers, the deer, the crabs, the trees…  all beings that cohabit the land. But, only if we agree to her terms. And when she looks away, devastation follows! Episodes from this legend as well as everyday aspects of Sunderban life are depicted by the traditional and contemporary doll-makers of Sunderban. Maati Katha (Earth Stories) brings these dolls – originally used for worship, child’s play and display – into the theatre for the first time, combining these art and craft traditions with contemporary object and material theatre practices. The play brings alive the Sunderbans through these clay dolls and the shape-shifting ‘maati’ (clay, mud, soil, earth, land) that not only forms the dolls, but also defines the land and grounds the philosophy of the region. In doing so, Maati Katha invites us to celebrate human resilience in the midst of fragility – a resilience that enables diverse communities to hold together through repeated upheavals of natural calamity and human violence. Bonbibi’s philosophy reigns, ‘You are all connected: the crocodile, the tiger, water, forest, land, all human beings … All!’

CONTEXT

‘Maati Katha’ (Earth Stories) came to life as part of an ongoing ethnographic research project that documents and archives the myriad stories surrounding traditional & contemporary doll making practices of West Bengal (a state in eastern India) ~ exploring their histories, folklores, oral traditions, myths, communitarian stories, as well as stories that are contemporary, quotidian and personal ~ and linkages to tangible and intangible heritage conservation. ‘Maati Katha’ emerges from the soil. It draws inspiration from the arts, lifestyles and philosophies of one of Eastern India's most marginalized & at-risk people – the people of the unique deltaic mangrove region of Sunderbans. The performance evolves out of Sunderban’s doll arts, people’s lives, folk legends and stories, the rich folk-performance tradition of 'Bonbibi Jatrapala', and music traditions like Bhatiyali, Baul, Jhumur. It marries these arts traditions to contemporary object and material theatre practices, seeking to celebrate and foreground the powerful story-carrying nature of these dolls. ‘Maati Katha’ marks a preliminary experiment in expanding the impact of the doll arts into diverse contexts, through interactions with a multitude of art forms. 

Choiti Ghosh is an Object Theatre practitioner, puppeteer, actor, singer, writer & director. Born into a family of 5 generations of theatre-makers, she was initiated early onto the stage. Her first performance was at the age of 3 years. In 1998, at the age of 18 years, she started her professional career in theatre with her home company ANANT which specialized in children’s theatre, as a performer, facilitator and manager. From 1999 – 2003, she worked simultaneously in the field of alternative education with the well-known educationist Prof. A.K. Jalaluddin. She gained her experience in different kinds of theatre in India by working as a freelance actor, singer, designer, writer with various theatre companies in India including Dr. Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre, Dr. Ashish Ghosh’s ANANT, Mr. Sunil Shanbag’s Arpana, Q Theatre Productions, Manav Kaul’s aRanya and various others. In 2004, Choiti was initiated into puppetry with Anurupa Roy’s Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust. She continues to be part of the group as a puppeteer, writer and singer. In 2010 she trained in Object Theatre under the well-known Belgian Object Theatre artiste Agnes Limbos at the Institut International de la Marionnette in Charleville Mezieres, France. In 2011 she started Tram Theatre with like-minded colleagues with the vision to specialise in Object Theatre in India. Choiti has been a researcher-in-residence at the Deutsches Forum fur Figurentheatre und Puppenspeilkunst (DFP) in Bochum, Germany in 2012 and at the Institut Internationale de la Marionnette, Charleville Mezieres, France (2015). She was part of the British Council India delegation to the Edinburgh Fringe Showcase, UK in 2012. She was a recipient of Sahitya Rangabhoomi Vinod Doshi Fellowship for Outstanding Young Artists for the year 2011. She is one of the founders of Tram Theatre, now known as Tram Arts Trust, of which she is the current Secretary.

Shayoni Mitra works at the intersection of performance and politics. Her interest in political theatre stems from her years as an actor with Delhi based street theatre group Jana Natya Manch. She is currently revising toward publication her manuscript, “Contesting Capital: A History of Political Theatre in Postcolonial Delhi,” which interrogates the ever shifting, adapting expressions of political theatre under different configurations of power. It is a historical look at both proscenium and street theatre from the decade of Independence in the 1940s to the twenty first century. The manuscript covers a range of styles including folk and revolutionary singing troupes,  large open-air performances, topical agit-prop plays, intimate and improvized activist pieces and feminist performances. This understanding of what it means to be political in changing times, is linked fundamentally with the life and profile of a city. New Delhi, the new capital of postcolonial India offers a unique nexus of local, regional and national power from which to understand and interrogate the ways in which cultural policy functions in creating identity for a new nation and its multiple peoples. Read this way, the history of political theatre in Delhi becomes metonymic for the oppressed and marginalized populations of this ever expanding global city.

Prof. Mitra has taught courses on Indian, Asian and non-Western performances as well as modern Theatre History and Performance Studies. Her teaching bridges the gap between the global North and South, putting into dialogue the histories of Western Realism with classical, folk, stylized, avant garde and improvized forms from around the world. She actively embraces the scholar-practitioner-activist role encouraging the connections between pedagogy and praxis. Before coming to Barnard, she taught at Brown and New York University in the United States and conducted lectures and theatre workshops in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Milia University and Delhi University in India. Among her current projects is her collaboration with a group of sex workers in Sangli, Maharashtra, India examining the ways in which they use theatre for their political mobilization.

Sufia Uddin is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at Connecticut College.  Prof. Uddin earned her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and was formerly Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Vermont. Her research interest has focused on constructions of the Bengali-Muslim religious community from the colonial to the contemporary period and examines the many Bengali expressions of Islam. Her research covers shared sacred space and religious elements common to both Bengali Hindus and Muslims.  Uddin's book, "Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation," was published by UNC Press in 2006.

The topic of her latest work is marginalized communities of Muslims and Hindus who share recognition and veneration of Bonbibi (The Lady of the Forest) in the Sundarbans. Professor Uddin has translated the epic poem that conveys the story of how Bonbibi became a source of protection in this forest to honey collectors and fisherfolk. Through this research, Professor Uddin gained an appreciation for the labors of these people and their struggles to live sustainably in the mangrove forest which has led her to more serious investigation of the similarities between indigenous communities and these venerators. Her visits to the Sundarbans and study of religious life of Bonbibi venerators has become increasingly focused on the environment.

Uddin has been a recipient of teaching and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. In 2005-2006, Professor Uddin was a Fulbright Scholar conducting research in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. Her current research project takes her frequently to the remote mangrove forests of Bangladesh and West Bengal, India known as the Sundarbans, where she studies Muslim and Hindu veneration of Bonbibi.