Our 2012 season features five plays and one musical, all of which have been banned or burned, stirred controversy, sparked riots, landed their casts in jail, and remain incendiary to this day. Click here to buy tickets now!
By Arthur Schnitzler
Translated by G.J. Weinberger
January 31 - February 28, 2012
Banned for its frank portrayal of anti-Semitism in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. Professor Bernhardi: Vienna, 1900 - a pressure-cooker of politics, nationalism, and anti-Semitism. In a private medical clinic, the doctors jostle for power and status. Offstage, a young woman is dying of septic poisoning from a backstreet abortion. But thanks to a camphor injection, she's euphoric -- completely unaware of her impending doom. Professor Bernhardi, a highly respected surgeon and a Jew, decides to spare her the knowledge that she is dying. When the priest arrives to administer last rites, Bernhardi refuses him admittance. While the two clash, the girl dies, setting off a witch hunt that exposes the violent prejudices lurking beneath the city's glittering surface.
The Threepenny Opera
By Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
English version by Michael Feingold
February 6 - February 29, 2012
"What's a greater crime? Robbing a bank or founding one?" So asks Mack the Knife in THE THREEPENNY OPERA. This great wake-up call to the world is a mash-up of cabaret, opera, biting satire, Berlin dance bands, and acid harmonies. Intended as a lark, it became one of the great theatrical earthquakes of the 20th century. Populated by whores, beggars and thieves, cutthroat capitalists and capitalist cutthroats, THE THREEPENNY OPERA changed musical theatre history forever.
God of Vengeance
By Sholem Asch
Translated by Joseph C. Landis
October 2 - 28, 2012
Producer and actors were PROSECUTED for indecency after the 1923 Broadway premiere; the play centers on a brothel owner who dreams of striking a bargain with God to keep his daughter pure and features the world's first onstage lesbian kiss.
Spring's Awakening
By Frank Wedekind
October 8 - November 4, 2012
CENSORED and labeled as "perverse" for its depiction of emancipated adolescent sexual behavior, Spring's Awakening - not the musical, but Frank Wedekind's stunningly incendiary play about the madness of youth, bad parenting, sex, suicide, and sadomasochism - is also moving, hilarious, and endlessly provocative. One of the most iconic German plays since Faust.
Exorcism
By Eugene O'Neill
October 2 - 28, 2012
Every copy ordered BURNED by the playwright for the play's unflattering portrayal of his father; one copy discovered in 2011. According to John Lahr in the New Yorker, "Exorcism marks the tipping point - the moment in O'Neill's tortured life when he gave up the romance of death for the romance of art." The play tracks our greatest American playwright's descent into the inferno but ends on a note of redemption, as O'Neill emerged from his suicide attempt with newfound conviction to forge a life as a writer.
Night Games
The world premiere of a new play
By Dianna Russell and Lenny Leibowitz
Inspired by the works of Arthur Schnitzler
Dates to be announced!
Schnitzler's works, including his novellas, were ATTACKED and CENSORED by the Nazis, but his frank appraisal of human desire always stirred controversy. Inspired by "Dream Story," the same material that spawned the Stanley Kubrick film, "Eyes Wide Shut," NIGHT GAMES is part steamy thriller, part revenge fantasy, part nightmare, and part odyssey of the soul.