On Stage at Actors' Theatre
Paradise Lost
Performance Dates: May 2-4, 9-11 at 8pm; May 5 at 3pm
The debate over right and wrong has never been so satisfying. This ultra-contemporary new drama is fiercely engaging, irreverently funny, and deeply moving. The 17th century and present day are seamlessly intertwined as Satan vents to an audience about her frustration at being cast out of heaven and her thoughts on oppression. When she finds out that God has created delicate new creatures called "humans," she crafts a plan for revenge and betrayal on the Almighty.
National Premiere
POTUS
Performance Dates: September 12-21, 2024
A delicious feminist farce about the all-female staff that keeps the country out of war and other sticky situations while babysitting the dullard who holds the highest office in our beleaguered land. One four-letter word is about to rock 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When the President unwittingly spins a PR nightmare into a global crisis, the seven brilliant women he relies upon most risk life, liberty, and the pursuit of sanity to keep the commander-in-chief, and the country, out of trouble.
This Flat Earth
Performance Dates: October 10-19, 2024
A moving and deeply felt story of growing up in our confounding world. When the unthinkable happens at a middle school in a seaside town, a bewildered community is placed in the national spotlight. As adults try to pick up the pieces and return to ‘normal’, twelve-year-olds Julie and Zander are left to make sense of the world around them: their awkward crushes, the economic inequality, and the infinitely complicated world they will inherit.
*Midwest Premiere*
Alabaster
Performance Dates: February 27-March 8, 2025
A darkly comic Southern drama about love, art, and the power of women. After a tornado barrels through town leaving nothing but death and destruction, June has isolated herself, along with her goats on what remains of her family farm. June, who suffers from agoraphobia and crippling PTSD, is covered, from head to toe with scars. She gets up every day and feeds the goats, weeds the garden, and picks up her paintbrush. Alice, a world-renowned photographer, has come to take pictures of June for a series on women with scars, but what it turns out they need from each other is transcendent.
Botticelli in the Fire
Performance Dates: May 1-10, 2025
A hot-blooded contemporary queering of Renaissance Italy which questions how much of ourselves we are willing to sacrifice when society comes off the rails. Playboy Sandro Botticelli has it all: talent, fame, good looks. He also has the ear - and the wife - of Lorenzo de Medici, as well as the Florence's hottest young apprentice, Leonardo. But while he is at work on his breakthrough commission, The Birth of Venus, Botticelli's devotion to pleasure and beauty is put to the ultimate test. As plague sweeps through the city, the charismatic friar Girolamo Savonarola starts to stoke the fires of dissent against the liberal elite. Botticelli finds the life he knows breaking apart, forcing him to choose between love and survival.
*Michigan Premiere*