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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 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
GHOSTS 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 Curanda 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 Curanda 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