Boston University School of Theatre — Upcoming Shows & Performances

Fri Oct 9 – Sun Oct 11

Fringe Festival: The Seven Deadly Sins

by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht

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Fri Oct 9 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 10 · 2pm & 7:30pm / Sun Oct 11 · 2pm

Weill and Brecht’s 1933 sung ballet splits one woman in two: Anna I, the practical side, who sings, and Anna II, the artistic side, who dances. Sent by their family to earn the money for a little house on the Mississippi, they meet a different sin in each of seven American cities. Nathan Troup directs a spare Fringe staging, with Georgi Videnov conducting and Matthew Larson as music director.

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Sat Oct 17 – Sun Oct 18

Everybody

by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

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Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's rewriting of the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman, in which the actor who plays Everybody is drawn by lottery at each performance and the rest of the cast reshuffles into whatever parts are left. Death comes for Everybody, who then tries to persuade Friendship, Kinship and the others to come along. It was a Pulitzer finalist in 2018.

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Fri Oct 23 – Sun Oct 25

Fringe Festival: Vinkensport

by David T. Little and Royce Vavrek

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Fri Oct 23 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 24 · 2pm & 7:30pm / Sun Oct 25 · 2pm

David T. Little and Royce Vavrek’s opera is set at vinkensport, the Belgian folk contest that pits chaffinches and their owners against each other, each contestant tallying the calls of a rival’s bird. The competitors’ inner monologues and flashbacks reveal “deception, deep-seated rivalries, painful loneliness, and blossoming romance.” Lauren Lenz directs a spare Fringe staging, with student Ian Henscheid conducting and Allison Voth as music director.

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Sat Oct 24 – Sun Oct 25

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

by Will Arbery

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Four young conservative Catholics gather in a Wyoming back yard after their college mentor's inauguration and argue through the night about faith, the country and each other, while a generator fails somewhere off stage. Will Arbery's play was a 2020 Pulitzer finalist. BU stages it in a studio theatre.

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Thu Nov 5 – Sat Nov 7

Fringe Festival: The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

by Lorraine Hansberry

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Lorraine Hansberry's second and last Broadway play, set around a 1960s Greenwich Village political campaign, follows a disillusioned Village intellectual pulled back into commitment against his own better judgement, and takes in ethics, an interracial marriage, drugs and conformity. It opened in 1964 and closed the night Hansberry died. Part of BU's student Fringe Festival.

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Sun Nov 8 – Sat Nov 14

Theater(re) by Durang: Wanda's Visit, Medea, Phyllis and Xenobia, Women in a Playground, The Actors Nightmare and Diversions.

by Christopher Durang

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An evening of Christopher Durang's short comedies, among them The Actor's Nightmare, in which a man wanders on stage into a play he has never rehearsed and the cast carries on regardless, and a compressed Medea. Durang won the Tony for Best Play in 2013 for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

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Wed Nov 18 – Sun Nov 22

Violet

by Book & Lyrics by Brian Crawley; Music by Jeanine Tesori

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Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley's musical follows a young woman, scarred in a childhood accident, across the American South by Greyhound in 1964 to a television preacher she believes can heal her. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical.

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Sat Nov 21 – Sun Nov 22

Water by the Spoonful

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

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Quiara Alegría Hudes's play, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, sets an Iraq veteran's struggle to find a place at home against an online chat room where recovering addicts, his mother among them, keep each other going day by day.

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Thu Dec 3 – Sun Dec 6

Peerless

by Jiehae Park

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Jiehae Park's Macbeth transposed to the college admissions season: Asian-American twins M and L have arranged their whole lives around a place at The College, there is one spot, and the person holding it becomes a problem to be solved. The witches turn up as a classmate called Dirty Girl.

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Sat Feb 20 – Sun Feb 21

Sensitive Guys

by MJ Kaufman

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MJ Kaufman's play follows the Men's Peer Education group at Watson College, who believe self-awareness will end campus sexual violence, until a rumour reaches them. The cast is women and gender-nonconforming actors, double-cast as both the men and the women.

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Thu Feb 25 – Sun Feb 28

Le nozze di Figaro

by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte

· · 820 Commonwealth Ave · · ·

Thu Feb 25 · 7:30pm / Fri Feb 26 · 7:30pm / Sat Feb 27 · 2pm / Sun Feb 28 · 2pm

Mozart and Da Ponte’s 1786 comic opera, drawn from Beaumarchais’s play, follows the servants Figaro and Susanna through their wedding day as Count Almaviva pursues the bride and the Countess mourns his lost affection. William Lumpkin conducts. It is this season’s spring opera from the Opera Institute and the School of Theatre, an annual collaboration cast with students of the College of Fine Arts.

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Thu Apr 8 – Sun Apr 11

Watch on the Rhine

by Lillian Hellman

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Lillian Hellman's 1941 play brings a German anti-fascist organiser, his American wife and their three children out of Europe into her mother's comfortable house outside Washington, where a Romanian houseguest recognises him and the war they fled arrives with him. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award over Blithe Spirit.

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Fri Apr 16 – Sun Apr 25

The Old Man and the Old Moon

by PigPen Theatre Co.

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PigPen Theatre Co.'s folk musical, played with shadow puppetry, hand-made effects and a live band on stage: the old man whose job is to refill the moon with light each night leaves the post and sails after his wife, who has gone off following a song she half remembers.

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Thu Apr 22 – Sun Apr 25

The Rape of Lucretia

by Benjamin Britten and Ronald Duncan

· · 685 Commonwealth Ave · · ·

Thu Apr 22 · 7:30pm / Fri Apr 23 · 7:30pm / Sat Apr 24 · 2pm / Sun Apr 25 · 2pm

Britten’s chamber opera, first performed at Glyndebourne in 1946 to a libretto by Ronald Duncan, retells the Roman story of Lucretia, a general’s wife who is raped by the Etruscan prince Tarquinius and takes her own life. A Male and Female Chorus frame the action. William Lumpkin conducts and Clar Choquette directs, in a co-production of the School of Theatre and the Opera Institute.

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