Skip to main content

SLU Theatre & Dance Program Announces the 2023-24 Main Stage Season

04/11/2023

The Department of Fine & Performing Arts has announced its productions for the Theatre & Dance 2023-2024 season.

The new season which will consist of four main-stage productions. One show will be presented in Xavier Hall in the Main Stage Theatre, and the remaining three productions will be presented in Grand Center performance venues through SLU’s continued partnership with the Kranzberg Arts Foundation.

The Theatre & Dance faculty deliberate over many months to craft the main stage season.  On the Season Selection Committee this year are Theatre & Dance faculty Nancy Bell, Denisse Chavez, Lou Bird, and Program Director Lucy Cashion with consultation from Dance Program Director Holly Seitz Marchant and the rest of the Theatre & Dance faculty and staff.

SLU Theatre and Dance’s 2023-2024 Season invites the SLU community to go on a journey beyond the everyday.  

 “In the fall, we will start with familiar modes of realist representation, but there are cracks through which alternative realties creep in," said Assistant Professor of Theatre Yizhou Huang, Ph.D. "Set in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire at the dawn of the twentieth century, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town paints a picture of what life used to be with heavy strokes of Puritan romanticism. Wilder’s ingenious stage manager who is everywhere eclipses the question that who was left out.

"Such absence is catapulted into sharp relief by the portrayal of another white family in Young Jean Lee’s Broadway-tested play Straight White Men. Preceded by an unusual pre-show, an innocuous Christmas celebration of a middle-class father and his three adult sons unravels into an ambivalent rumination about how we can move forward after acknowledging what is wrong in our society.

"In the spring, we will drift further from reality and wander into the dreamscape. Dreaming of Lear delves into the human psyche and breathes new life to Shakespeare’s timeless classic. Turning away from language, the Spring Dance Concert, Dreamscape, guides us with bodies, movements, and kinesthetic experiences. We hope you will join us on this extraordinary journey.”

Artwork for Straight White Men shows a yellow house on a blue background

Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee.

Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee

When Ed and his three adult sons come together to celebrate Christmas, they enjoy cheerful trash-talking, pranks, and takeout Chinese. Then they confront a problem that even being a happy family can’t solve: When identity matters, and privilege is problematic, what is the value of being a straight white man?

From playwright Young Jean Lee in March 2013, “As an experiment, I wrote a straight white male character who did all of the things I’ve heard people say they wished straight white men would do: acknowledge your privilege, shut up and listen, don’t take up too much room, don’t think you know everything, put yourself in others’ shoes. The result: NOBODY liked him.” 

Yellow hands against a red background

Our Town by Thornton Wilder.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Described by Edward Albee as "the greatest American play ever written," Our Town presents the small town of Grover’s Corners in three acts: "Daily Life," "Love and Marriage" and "Death and Eternity." Narrated by a stage manager and performed with minimal props and sets, the play depicts the simple daily lives of the Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry, and eventually – in one of the most famous scenes in American theatre – die.

From Assistant Professor of Theatre and resident lighting designer Denisse Chavez, “Our Town has been incredibly popular since it was first produced in 1938. Its enduring appeal to audiences stems from its timelessness. Set in the fictional town of Grover's Corners, Our Town sets out to capture and appreciate the small, seemingly insignificant but actually wondrous moments of life and placing them against the immensities of space, time, and eternity. I'm excited for it to be a part of our season. As we near the end of the play, our protagonist Emily asks her Stage Manager: Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? It's possible the residents of Grover's Corners, a community that praises small town virtues, do not appreciate all the everyday events in life because they did not find value in them. But is it also possible that they are unable to appreciate life to the fullest extent possible because of their close-minded lives in their close-minded town? Is it possible that there is a little bit of Grover's Corners in our own communities? I think so, for better or worse.”

A gold skull wearing a crown on a purple background

Dreaming of Lear —A Devised Work based on Shakespeare’s King Lear

Dreaming of Lear —A Devised Work based on Shakespeare’s King Lear

Dreaming of Lear is a multi-media reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy filtered through the unconscious. It is a work of devised theatre in which participating artists reconstruct the play based on dreams they have while listening to recordings of King Lear. The production the audience experiences consists of recorded interviews with the ensemble of dreamers, fragments of Shakespeare's King Lear, and the realization of the ensemble’s dreams on stage. Dreaming of Lear is created in collaboration with Prison Performing Arts’ Alumni Company.

A gold dancer against a red backdrop

Dreamscape — A Student Choreographed Dance Concert of Original Works.

Dreamscape — A Student Choreographed Dance Concert of Original Works

From Dance Program Director Holly Seitz Marchant, “The interplay between dreams and reality has long fueled human imagination. Our personal ideas, hopes, dreams and nightmares work at the edges of our subconscious awareness often revealing inner dimensions of our lives. Movement is an ideal medium for both contemplation and expression of the lived experience at the liminal intersection of the oneiric and waking mind. Join the student choreographers of SLU Theatre & Dance for an evening of new and original dance artworks that bring dreamscapes into reality.”

Auditions and Interviews

Auditions and technical interviews for Straight White Men and Our Town will be held in Xavier Hall on Wednesday, Aug. 23, and Thursday, Aug. 24 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Callbacks will be held over the following two days.  

Auditions for Dreaming of Lear and Dreamscape will take place in January 2024.  All SLU students are invited to participate.  Students do not have to be a major or minor to take part in the productions.

Tickets go on sale in Summer 2023. For more information, check out the Fine & Performing Arts website.