Choosing the right show for a college theatre production can be both an exciting and daunting task. Whether you’re aiming for a drama that challenges your cast or a musical comedy that’ll fill your theatre, we have the ideal show to set the tone for your season. From timeless classics to contemporary hits, this list of some of the best shows for colleges and universities will help you find the perfect fit.
Plays
BLKS by Aziza Barnes
When stuff goes down, your girls show up. Waking up to a shocking and personal health scare, Octavia and her best friends, June and Imani, go on a crusade to find intimacy and joy in a world that could give a f*** less about them or their feelings. This 24-hour blitz explores what it is to be a queer blk woman in 2015 New York, how we survive and save ourselves from ourselves.
John Proctor Is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower
At a rural high school in Georgia, a group of lively teens are studying The Crucible while navigating young love, sex ed, and a few school scandals. Holding a contemporary lens to the American classic, they begin to question who is really the hero and what is the truth, discovering their own power in the process. Alternately touching and bitingly funny, this new comedy captures a generation in mid-transformation, running on pop music, optimism, and fury, writing their own coming-of-age story.
The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman & Members of Tectonic Theater Project
In October 1998, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Wyoming was kidnapped, severely beaten, and left tied to a fence in the middle of the prairie outside Laramie, Wyoming. His bloody, bruised, and battered body was not discovered until the next day, and he died several days later in an area hospital. His name was Matthew Shepard, and he was the victim of this assault because he was gay. Moisés Kaufman and fellow members of the Tectonic Theater Project made six trips to Laramie over the course of a year and a half, in the aftermath of the beating and during the trial of the two young men accused of killing Shepard. They conducted more than 200 interviews with the people of the town. Some people interviewed were directly connected to the case, while others were citizens of Laramie, and the breadth of the reactions to the crime is fascinating. Kaufman and Tectonic Theater members have constructed a deeply moving theatrical experience from these interviews and their own experiences in Laramie. The Laramie Project is a breathtaking collage that explores the depths to which humanity can sink and the heights of compassion of which we are capable.
Also see its companion play The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later.
Proof by David Auburn
On the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, Catherine, a troubled young woman, has spent years caring for her brilliant but unstable father, a famous mathematician. Now, following his death, she must deal with her own volatile emotions; the arrival of her estranged sister, Claire; and the attentions of Hal, a former student of her father’s who hopes to find valuable work in the 103 notebooks that her father left behind. Over the long weekend that follows, a burgeoning romance and the discovery of a mysterious notebook draw Catherine into the most difficult problem of all: How much of her father’s madness—or genius—will she inherit?
Winner of the 2001 Tony Award® for Best Play & Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Stop Kiss by Diana Son
“A poignant and funny play about the ways, both sudden and slow, that lives can change irrevocably,” says Variety. After Callie meets Sara, the two unexpectedly fall in love. Their first kiss provokes a violent attack that transforms their lives in a way they could never anticipate.
Clyde’s by Lynn Nottage
In Clyde’s, a truck stop sandwich shop offers its formerly incarcerated kitchen staff a shot at redemption. Even as the shop’s callous owner tries to keep them down, the staff members learn to reclaim their lives, find purpose, and become inspired to dream by their shared quest to create the perfect sandwich.
Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in 1936. We meet them at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken revelry and dancing. Their spare existence is interrupted by brief, colorful bursts of music from the radio, their only link to the romance and hope of the world at large. The action of the play is told through the memory of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters as he remembers the five women who raised him: his mother and four maiden aunts. He is only seven in 1936, the year his elderly uncle, a priest, returns after serving for twenty-five years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. For the young boy, two other disturbances occur that summer. The sisters acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. And he meets his father for the first time, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields. From these small events spring the cracks that destroy the foundation of the family forever. Widely regarded as Brian Friel’s masterpiece, this haunting play is Friel’s tribute to the spirit and valor of the past.
Winner of the 1992 Tony Award® for Best Play
Marisol by José Rivera
Marisol Perez, a young Latino woman, is a copy editor for a Manhattan publisher. Although she has elevated herself into the white collar class, she continues to live alone in the dangerous Bronx neighborhood of her childhood. As the play begins, Marisol narrowly escapes a vicious attack by a golf club-wielding madman while traveling home on the subway. Later that evening Marisol is visited by her guardian angel who informs her that she can no longer serve as Marisol’s protector because she has been called to join the revolution already in progress against an old and senile God who is dying and “taking the rest of the universe with him.” The war in heaven spills over into New York City, reducing it to a smoldering urban wasteland where giant fires send noxious smoke to darken the skies, where the moon has not been seen in months, where the food has been turned to salt, and water no longer seeks its level. Alone, without her protector, Marisol begins a nightmare journey into this new war zone where she is attacked by a man with an ice cream cone demanding back pay for his extra work on Taxi Driver. Marisol finds herself on the streets, homeless, where her many encounters include a woman beaten for exceeding her credit limit and a homeless burn victim in a wheelchair looking for his lost skin. With the apocalypse well under way, the angels have traded in their wings for Uzis and wear leather motorcycle jackets and fatigues. As the action builds to a crescendo, the masses of homeless and displaced people join the angels in the war to save the universe.
Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury
At the Frasier household, preparations for Grandma’s birthday party are underway. Beverly is holding on to her sanity by a thread to make sure this party is perfect, but her sister can’t be bothered to help, her husband doesn’t seem to listen, her brother is MIA, her daughter is a teenager, and maybe nothing is what it seems in the first place…! Fairview is a searing examination of families, drama, family dramas, and the insidiousness of white supremacy.
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Hangmen by Martin McDonagh
It’s 1965, and the death penalty has just been abolished in the United Kingdom. Naturally all of Oldham, northern England, wants to know what Harry, the second-best hangman in the country, has to say about it. As the news breaks, Harry’s pub is overrun with locals and reporters looking for a quote, until a visitor arrives with a darker and more mysterious agenda.
Poor Clare by Chiara Atik
It’s 1211 in Assisi, Italy, and Clare’s got beauty, wealth, and a rich suitor who showers her with expensive presents. So why is she so drawn to this guy Francis who gave up all his possessions just because poor people are suffering? Everyone in town says he’s crazy. And yet…she starts seeing everything in her life differently. This hilarious, anachronistic telling of the real story of St. Clare considers the cost of doing good—and how little has changed for the haves and the have-nots in almost a millennium.
Tambo & Bones by Dave Harris
Tambo and Bones are two characters trapped in a minstrel show. It’s mad hard to feel like a real person when you’re trapped in a minstrel show. Their escape plan: get out, get bank, get even. A rags-to-riches hip-hop journey, this comedy roasts America’s racist past, wrestles with America’s racist present, and explodes America’s post-racial future—where what’s at stake, for those deemed less than human, is the fate of humanity itself.
Usual Girls by Ming Peiffer
Kyeoung has spent her entire life negotiating the double standards imposed on her as an Asian American woman. Bullied by boys in childhood, ostracized by girls as a teen, and gas-lit by men as an adult, her experiences with sexuality grow more and more challenging. As we trace Kyeoung from the insecurity of puberty to the disenchantment of her adult life, Usual Girls chronicles the wonder, pain, and complexity of growing up female.
Musicals
Bat Boy: The Musical Story & Book by Keythe Farley & Brian Flemming, Music & Lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe
Based on a story in The Weekly World News, Bat Boy: The Musical is a musical comedy/horror show about a half boy/half bat creature who is discovered in a cave near Hope Falls, West Virginia. For lack of a better solution, the local sheriff brings Bat Boy to the home of the town veterinarian, Dr. Parker, where he is eventually accepted as a member of the family and taught to act like a “normal” boy by the veterinarian’s wife, Meredith, and teenage daughter, Shelley. Bat Boy is happy with his new life, but when he naively tries to fit in with the narrow-minded people of Hope Falls, they turn on him, prodded by the machinations of Dr. Parker, who secretly despises Bat Boy. Shelley and Bat Boy, who have fallen in love, run away together from the ignorant townfolk and have a blissful coupling in the woods, but their happiness is shattered when Meredith arrives and reveals a secret. Soon the entire town arrives and hears the shocking story of Bat Boy’s unholy origin.
Hello Again Book, Music & Lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa
Ten nameless characters pair up in ten different scenes of sexual pleasure and/or despair. One character from each scene moves on to the next, seemingly dumping his old partner in favor of new prey. The play begins in 1900 with a Prostitute soliciting an unwilling Soldier. The next scene takes place in the 1940s, and the Soldier, afraid of dying in the war, tussles with a sympathetic Nurse. Next, the Nurse becomes a 1960s dominatrix over her patient, an upper-crust College Boy with wild leanings. In the 1930s, the College Boy reappears as the impotent partner of an adulterous Young Wife who can only have relations with him in seedy, out-of-the-way places. Meeting the woman’s Husband in the next scene, we see why she’s been driven to such moral turpitude. In her loneliness, the Wife dances a haunting pas-de-deux with the mirror image of her repressed, sensual self. Experiencing the Wife’s scene from a totally different perspective, we then meet the Husband as a closet homosexual (and on the Titanic, no less), using the ship’s imminent demise to steal a tango with a gorgeous boy hustler called the Young Thing. Shifting to a 1970s disco, a bisexual Writer lures the Young Thing home only to feel the creeping certainty of a morning-after desertion. Finally, the circle of lovers closes where it all began. A Senator quits his relationship with an Actress because of political liabilities, then seeks the Prostitute from the first scene, whom he desperately wishes he could love. A tableau begins forming in the background, with all the couples singing “Hello Again” over and over in a moody recognition of love’s inescapable pull.
Gone Missing Created by The Civilians, Written by Steve Cosson from Interviews by the Company, Music & Lyrics by Michael Friedman, “Interview with Dr. Palinurus” by Peter Morris
A wry and whimsical documentary musical of loss devised from interviews with real-life New Yorkers by The Civilians, the acclaimed New York-based company. This collection of very personal accounts of things “gone missing” —everything from keys, personal identification and a Gucci pump to family heirlooms, your dog and your mind—creates a unique tapestry of the ways in which we deal with loss in our lives. A flexible company of six performs more than thirty characters, intertwining these stories of lost objects with tales from some unusual “finders,” ranging from a retired NYPD cop to a pet psychic. Set against eclectic and tuneful songs by Michael Friedman, Gone Missing is about the little things in life —seen largely.
In the Green by Grace McLean
As a young girl, medieval saint, healer, visionary, exorcist, and composer Hildegard von Bingen was locked in a cloister’s cell after demonstrating a preternatural sensitivity to the world around her. Sequestered with Hildegard is Jutta, a woman who has spent her life secluded in an effort to recover a whole self after the deepest of trauma. Under Jutta’s guidance, Hildegard attempts to reassemble her own fragmented self while her mentor proselytizes a rejection of brokenness. In the Green is a musical unlike any you’ve seen, an astonishingly, sonically sophisticated saga of two exceptional women broken by the world and their journey of healing that changed history.
The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin Book, Music and Lyrics by Kirsten Childs
What’s a Black girl from sunny Southern California to do? White people are blowing up Black girls in Birmingham churches. Black people are shouting “Black is beautiful” while straightening their hair and coveting light skin. Viveca Stanton’s answer: Slap on a bubbly smile and be as white as you can be! In a humorous and pointed coming-of-age story spanning the 60s through the 90s, Viveca blithely sails through the confusing worlds of racism, sexism, and Broadway showbiz until she’s forced to face the devastating effects of self-denial.
LIZZIE Music by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer & Alan Stevens Hewitt, Lyrics by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer & Tim Maner, Book by Tim Maner, Additional Music by Tim Maner, Additional Lyrics by Alan Stevens Hewitt, Based on an original concept by Alan Stevens Hewitt & Tim Maner, Orchestrations by Alan Stevens Hewitt
In the heat of late summer 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife are found murdered in their house. The main suspect in the murders is Andrew’s youngest daughter from a previous marriage, Lizzie Borden. Using a searing rock score, and based on the historical record, LIZZIE explores the heady and heated days leading up to the murder and Lizzie’s controversial acquittal of all charges and the creation of a new American myth.
