The Glass Menagerie
By Tennessee Williams
Directed by Kevin Hagan
Featuring Ensemble Members Allison Batty, Mike Falevits
and Linda Reiter
September 4–November 2, 2008

Inspired by events in his own life, "The Glass Menagerie" is the play that launched Williams' career. This is a memory play--both the style and the content of the play are shaped by memory. But most importantly, the story of the play is told because of the inflexible grip it has on the narrator's memory. Aspiring poet Tom dreams of nothing more than escaping his job in a shoe warehouse, which he holds to support his fading Southern belle mother, Amanda, and painfully shy, crippled sister, Laura. Laura herself escapes the world by caring for her cherished glass menagerie of animals. Amanda, once a beautiful woman with scores of suitors, is severely disappointed in her daughter's lack thereof. When Amanda schemes to bring a potential gentleman caller to dinner, she threatens the fragile balance of the entire family. Intended to be anything but a quaint and realistic snapshot in time, Williams employs themes of illusion and escape to depict the delicacy of family life. The result is a powerfully haunting and dream-like story, full of the lyrical Southern English for which he was famous.

The Little Foxes
By Lillian Hellman
Director TBA
January 8–March 8, 2009

Lillian Hellman's cynical play of family greed and revenge, "The Little Foxes," is her most popular piece of drama. Despite being well off, the unscrupulous Hubbard siblings—Regina, Ben, Oscar, and Leo—are driven by insatiable greed to acquire ever more wealth. Stealing and plotting against each other, they attempt to invest in one of the first cotton mills to industrialize the New South, a plan that stands to win them millions of dollars. Like the cyclic treachery of a Greek tragedy, the family forbearers harvested their merchant profits by overcharging newly freed slaves; now the present Hubbards will create a larger dynasty on the toil of poor workers, who will flock to the cotton mill for paltry wages. Sacrificing everything, they will betray each other to gain anything. While critics disagree whether this is a satire or morality play, it is enduringly relevant, and symbolizes the predatory capitalism that Hellman felt threatened the American ethic.

Buried Child
By Shelagh Delaney
Directed by Steve Scott
Featuring Ensemble Members Allison Batty, Maury Cooper
and Linda Reiter
May 14-July 12, 2009

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child is a macabre tale about a Midwestern American family and their dark secret. When Vince brings his girlfriend Shelly home to meet his family, the "Norman Rockwell" charm of the Illinois farmhouse soon gives over to violent dysfunction. There is the incapacitated and alcoholic patriarch Dodge, his hypocritically religious wife Halie, their son, Tilden, the semi-idiot who is also Vince's father, and Bradley, a bully who has a wooden leg. Oddly, no one seems to remember Vince. Through the long night, the secret they had buried so long ago slowly comes to the surface. With its lower-class, sometimes humorous, recognizable characters and dialogue, "Buried Child" resembles the mid-century American realism and grotesquerie of Arthur Miller ("Death of a Salesman") or Tennessee Williams ("A Streetcar Named Desire"). The play contains many of Shepard's favorite motifs: a quirky, often frightening, family of antagonists contained in a claustrophobic farmhouse somewhere in the great American Midwest.

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