2024-2025 Season

These Shining Lives
November 15-17, November 19-23

These Shining Lives is based on a true story of four women working for the Radium Dial Company – a watch factory in Ottawa, Illinois. It shows women getting a chance for a well-paying job in the 1920s and early 1930s. The job seems easy enough, to paint the hour markings onto different-sized watch dials using a radium compound that glows in the dark. The company tells the women that there is no evidence that radium is harmful and even that it has health benefits. After a period of time, the workers notice that their hands start glowing in the dark but assume that it is just from the radium powder used to paint the faces. The ladies later develop ailments, including jaw infections and bone pain. The play showcases the danger women faced in this workplace and highlights the wider lack of concern companies had for protecting the health of their employees. These Shining Lives chronicles the strength and determination of women considered expendable in their day, exploring their true story and its continued resonance. Theirs is a story of survival in its most transcendent sense, as they refuse to allow the company that stole their health to kill their spirits—or endanger the lives of those who come after them.

These Shining Lives has a humanistic glow…clockwork precision…an initially comic and ultimately tragic look at how individual women find employment within a system more concerned with profit than safety.” —Variety.

“Perfect, touching and wistful…beautifully tragic.” —Talkin’ Broadway.

Outside Mullingar
January 17-19, January 21-25

Outside Mullingar is set in the Midlands of Ireland, and involves two farmers, Anthony and Rosemary, two introverted misfits straddling 40, who live next to each other. Rosemary has been romantically interested in Anthony her entire life. Anthony, who is shy and unaware of Rosemary’s feelings, dislikes farming, so his father intends to leave the farm to a nephew. With Anthony’s father threatening to disinherit him and a land feud simmering between their families, Rosemary has every reason to fear romantic catastrophe. But then, in this very Irish story with a surprising depth of poetic passion, these yearning, eccentric souls fight their way towards solid ground and some happiness. Their journey is heartbreaking, funny, and ultimately deeply moving. Outside Mullingar is a compassionate, delightful work about how it’s never too late to take a chance on love.

“A softhearted comedy freckled with dark reflections on the unsatisfactory nature of life and the thorns of love.” —The New York Times.

“Outside Mullingar is a valentine to the wonder and weirdness of love.” —New York Daily News.

Cry It Out!
March 14-16, March 18-22

Four months ago, Jessie was a corporate lawyer with a glamorous Manhattan life. Today, she is in dirty yoga pants, covered in breast milk, trying to comfort a screaming newborn. Isolated in a sleepy Long Island suburb while her commuter husband works long hours, Jessie is desperate to talk to anyone besides Food Network. So when she spies a fellow new mom and neighbor, Lina, at the local Stop & Shop, she vaults over the cantaloupe to introduce herself. Happy to have found each other, the two moms agree to meet for coffee during naptime in the sweet spot behind their adjoining yards where both their baby monitors get reception, and a fast friendship is born. But their intimacy is punctured when a stranger who lives in the mansion up on the cliff appears in the yard, asking if they would include his wife, a new mom who is having “a hard time,” in their coffee klatch. Reluctantly, the duo tries to become a trio, but with mixed and surprising results. A comedy with dark edges, Cry It Out takes an honest look at the absurdities of being home with a baby, the power of female friendship, the dilemma of going back to work, and the effect class has on parenthood in America.

“A funny story that weaves together very different but highly meaningful stories from three new mothers.” —USA Today

“Empathetic and enjoyable … it all rings utterly true. I liked it so much I wanted to set up a daycare in the lobby.” — Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

Exit Laughing
May 16-18, May 20-24

When the biggest highlight in your life for the past 30 years has been your weekly bridge night out with the “girls,” what do you do when one of your foursome inconveniently dies? If you’re Connie, Leona and Millie, three southern ladies from Birmingham, you do the most daring thing you’ve ever done. You “borrow” the ashes from the funeral home for one last card game, and the wildest, most exciting night of your lives involves a police raid, a stripper, and a whole new way of looking at all the fun you can have when you’re truly living.

“Hysterically funny!” -News-Leader.com

The Star Spangled Girl
September 20-22, September 24-28

Andy and Norman are two earnest young men using their apartment as a publishing office for a “protest” magazine in San Francisco. Sophie, an Olympic swimmer and all-American girl, moves into another apartment on the same floor. Her friendliness and charm leave Norman hopelessly smitten. Meanwhile, his partner is fielding telephone calls from the irate printer who wants to collect the money due him, and distracting the landlady from thoughts of back rent with motorcycle rides and surfing expeditions. And while she is convinced that they are editing a dangerously subversive magazine, Sophie soon finds that her real source of annoyance is that the wrong man is pressing his attention on her. Happily, this situation is reversed in time, as love and politics blend delightfully in a bubbling series of funny happenings, set forth by Neil Simon’s mastery of skill and inventiveness.

“Mr. Simon can do wonders… with casually tossed-off fantasies that pop up from nowhere and whistle as they go by.” – The New York Times

“Charm, brightness, deft inventiveness and capacity for good, honest hilarity.” – New York Post