Huntington Theatre

When you put 4 couples and 3 bedrooms on one witty night, Alan Ayckbourn creates marital mishegoss with a British accent. Trevor and Susannah, with their marriage on the rocks, invade the bedrooms of their family and friends over the course of an evening, spreading chaos in their wake. Director Maria Aitken (The 39 Steps, Private Lives) returns to the Huntington Theatre for this light comedy of marital misunderstandings.

Squabbling siblings Albert and Jennifer Chen attained academic achievement. But as adults, they’re socially awkward depressed failures: he’s just been passed up for promotion and she’s been dumped by her loser boyfriend. So pivoting to the West and the East, they confront their Tiger parents and launch an Asian Freedom Tour! From California to China and back, this new comedy examines race, parenting, and success.

Stephen Sondheim’s stunning masterpiece centers on enigmatic painter Georges Seurat and his obssession with “the art of making art.” Certainly, one of the most acclaimed musicals ever, this Pulitzer Prize winner features a glorious score, with the songs “Finishing the Hat,” “Putting it Together,” and “Move On,” and is directed by Artistic Director Peter DuBois who did a superb job with last year's A Little Night Music.

After Boston University decided to sell the building in which the Huntington Theatre Company has had its lovely theatre last Fall, there was a great deal of agita and even grief as to what would become of the Huntington. Would the theatre company have to relocate? Would the large structure be torn down for expensive condos? Could the City of Boston help find a development/real estate partner? Like a Deus Ex Machina, Good News has arrived with a happy ending.

On Halloween night, various individuals are weighing their life questions and answers. Sparky Miranda is desperate for a way out of her situation. She’s up to her neck in debt, she might be actually falling for the man who pays her bills, and now her week-end date has threatened to kill her. A seemingly sweet stranger offers shelter and a drink. Where will the night end? With dark humor, two-time Pulitzer finalist Gina Gionfriddo presents complicated and somewhat incomplete characters wrestling with love, money, and their past. This sometimes awkward show is about people making strategically bad life choices and mostly talking about it. Using contemporary themes roughly juxtaposed, the playwright uncomfortably lays out no easy answers.

In this wonderful solo show, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson shares entertaining and provocative stories about youth-- his first few jobs, a stay in jail, various colorful friends, encounters with racism, music, and love as a young poet in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Directed by Todd Kreidler and featuring Eugene Lee, both longtime Wilson collaborators, this memoir charts Wilson’s journey of self-discovery through adversity, and what it means to be a black artist in America. This narrative journey, brilliantly performed by Eugene Lee, solidifies Wilson’s theatrical and cultural legacy.

Annie and her two teenage best buds want the same things: the hottest new phones, cute boys, designer bags. But when they enter into a pregnancy pact, she wonders if there might be a different path and a brighter future. Huntington Playwriting Fellow Kirsten Greenidge (Luck of the Irish) finds raw humor and grit in this provocative production, torn-from-the-headlines drama.

Disgraced is engaging, thought-provoking theatre. The narrative is about difficult situations in a compicated world. . It demands that you pay attention from the opening scene until the play's end. A stellar cast and perceptive direction make this an evening of theatre that you will not soon forget.

Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by John Kennedy Toole by Jeffrey Hatcher, A Confederacy of Dunces tells the episodic tale of Ignatius Reilly, a snobslob, of the most eccentric kind. Set in New Orleans in the early 1960s, there are many outstanding performances and fine stagecraft. But the novel seems to overwhelm the theatrical production. Worth seeing for the performances, but it is a work in progress.

Regarding Boston Theatre it is broke and time to fix it. This fall as one shoe after another dropped the Boston Theatre Community seemed to collapse like a house of cards. In 2004 through a partnership between Druker Development, Boston Center for the Arts and the Huntington Theatre Company the multi-stage Calderwood Pavilion was created in the South End. Is it possible that Huntington can swing a similar development to save, renovate and expand its antiquated facility? That's just a part of dramatic changes for the city.

A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980 eleven years after John Kennedy Toole's suicide. Recently the creative team- adapter Jeffrey Hatcher, director David Esbjornson, and actor Nick Offerman- met with the media to discuss the production for Boston's Huntington Theatre Company. The comedy will run from November 11 through December 13.

If bad luck comes in threes what's next for the Boston theatre community. Today we have reported on the break up of a 33-year-old relationship between the Huntington Theatre Company and Boston University. Now we report news the Emerson College, the owner of the 115-year-old Colonial Theatre has plans to convert it into a student center. These developments were predicted several years ago by then NEA chair Rocco Landesman. As he suggests, here in the Berkshires, there are too many arts organizations pursuing the same limited potential donors.

For the past 33 years the partnership between The Huntington Theatre Company and Boston University has provided superb theatre to audiences of up to 200,000. In addition to the Huntington Avenue venue it created the Calderwood Pavilion in 2004 in Boston’s South End.

It is the lilting story of lovers reuniting with passions reigniting while new romances flower. Set around famous actress Desiree Armfeldt along with a cadre of unforgettable characters, this is a fabulous production on every level. The action is focused during an eventful weekend in the country. This is Maestro Stephen Sondheim’s most romantic and popular work. It features a sumptuous score infused with humor, warmth flavored by a waltz. Sondheim’s best known song, “Send in the Clowns” integrates exquisitely into the narrative. Brilliantly directed by Artistic Director Peter DuBois, this extraordinary musical already may be one of the best productions of the 2015-16 season.

What makes ordinary people do terrible things? Daniel, a young, gay aspiring writer, seeks a fresh start and a new job at the local bookstore that he loved as a child. When he meets Linda, the Filipina-American bookshop owner, they discover a connection that goes deeper than a love of literature. Artistic Director Peter DuBois directs the New England premiere of A. Rey Pamatmat’s at times gripping and intimate new play about changing attitudes, forgiveness and second chances.

A play about dreams and desires unmet, it is the story of Doc and Lola Delaney's rather somber middle class life. To make ends meet, they rent a room in their cluttered Midwestern home to Marie, an unapologetic young college student. Her youthful vitality stirs up forgotten dreams and missed opportunities. Directed by David Cromer, this is an intimate and heartrending portrait of a marriage and painful life partnership fading from youthful exuberance to middle age stasis. The acting is superb and the stagecraft is appealing.

Tony Simotes was summarily ousted from Shakespeare & Company when he got on the wrong side with a micro managing now former board president Sarah Hancock. Significantly, she is a close friend of founding artistic director, Tina Packer, whose vision of the company was very different from Simotes who replaced her. Rick Dildine who was brought in with a mandate for change soon realized the chain of command and hastily departed. In a matter of months the company went from plan B to plan C. When we met with Simotes for a long lunch he was not inclined to sort out those loose ends. He is upbeat about new possibilities as second in command to Kate Maguire and the richly enhanced Berkshire Theatre Group.

Greatly and rightly honored George C. Wolfe’s one-act play uses satire and wit to describe the pain, joy and thematic contradictions of the African American Experience. He sets forth 11 "exhibits" or sketches to use humor, wit and song to express the human journey of the American Black experience. Shattering many stereotypes, he brilliantly embraces others. With an incredibly talented cast, this Huntington production is all about anger, love and survival with just enough in your face acknowledgement to make you entertained but clearly instructed.

Set in August of 1912 with Eugene O'Neill's classic Long Day's Journey into Night as a backdrop, The Second Girl is set in the downstairs world of the Tyrone family kitchen. Two Irish immigrant servant girls and the American-born chauffeur search for identity love and success in their world beset by circumstances and human mistakes. It is the world premiere by Huntington Playwriting Fellow Ronan Noone and directed by actor/director Campbell Scott.

A Chekhovian mashup from master of comedy playwright Christopher Durang, Vanya and Sonia's quiet, bucolic and rather boring life is upended when their glamorous movie star sister Masha arrives with her brawny boy toy Spike in tow. This Tony Award-winning Broadway treat is both a rollicking and touching comedy that pays loving homage to Chekhov's classic themes of loss and existential longing.

Set in a cramped Bronx apartment, three generations of a working-class Jewish family are frustrated in their dreams of a brighter future. Matriarch Bessie Berger's fierce determination keeps her family afloat, whatever the cost. Gritty, passionate, funny, and heartbreaking, With outstanding performances, Odets' 1935 drama captures both the hopes, disappointments and struggles of a memorable American family.

This clever production tells the story of the search for a new treatment promising to end pain as it pits a doctor and his student in an epic battle between altruism and ambition, ego and empathy. Based on the true story of the discovery of ether as an anesthetic in 1846, it is set in Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. This new play explores the horror of pain, the sweetness of relief, and the very modern notion of the hysteria that erupts when healthcare becomes big business.

Set in the 1960s, this an alternating funny and poignant new stage adaptation that offers a contemporary interpretation of the 1967 Academy Award-winning star-filled film. It features Julia Duffy (“Newhart”), Tony Award winner Adriane Lenox (Doubt), and Will Lyman with Malcolm-Jamal Warner (“The Cosby Show”) making his Huntington debut. Still relevant nearly 50 years after the movie it was based upon, this is a story about race, prejudice and acceptance.

Are our biases and prejudices hard-wired? Four Harvard-connected intellectuals: a doctor, an actress, a psychologist, and a neurobiologist studying the human brain’s response to race all search for love, success, and identity. But it is a complex world. Written with insight tempered by barbed wit, Huntington Playwriting Fellow Lydia R. Diamond (Stick Fly) cleverly speaks to the nature of racism, stereotypes, and sexual mores in the 21st Century. It is provocative, funny but often painfully true.

In 2013 Nicholas Martin was nominated for a Tony as best director. While known on Broadway he is remembered for serving as artistic director of Huntington Theatre Company in Boston followed by three years in that capacity with Williamstown Theatre Festival. His term was shortened by a stroke as he continued to work following a full schedule on both coasts. For the extended theatre family that loved him Nicky was a warm and supportive father figure.