The 2024-2025 season at Studio Theatre will maintain the momentum established this year with hits like Love, Love, Love and Fat Ham, bringing a diverse array of fresh, fascinating, buzzworthy productions to DC audiences. The 2024-2025 season slate demonstrates Studio’s ongoing commitment to advocating for uncompromising contemporary artists and providing a home for plays that get you to think by asking you to feel.
“It’s a season of extraordinary range,” said Studio Artistic Director David Muse. “We’ve got David Auburn’s recent Broadway hit, starring DC stalwarts Holly Twyford and Kate Eastwood Norris; Bruce Norris’s provocative look at sex offenders who have served their sentences; a sharp and playful look at failing public school systems; a world premiere about mental health interventions for the police force told from the point of view of an actor trying to make sure the police take the work seriously.
“Our Associate Artistic Director Danilo Gambini makes his directing debut at Studio with a new play about three retired women learning to surf. We’ll transform the Victor Shargai Theatre into a 1949 jazz club for a music-filled drama by audience favorite Dominique Morisseau. Studio is as ambitious as ever, custom-fitting projects to our spaces.”
Subscriptions for next season are currently on sale at studiotheatre.org. Single tickets for the 2024-2025 season will go on sale in late summer.
ABOUT THE SEASON
Exception to the Rule, by Dave Harris. Directed by Miranda Haymon. Six Black students at the city’s worst high school wait out Friday detention, but no one can figure out how “College Bound Erika” ended up stuck here too. The rules are simple: a teacher has to sign their form before anyone can leave the room. But no adults have made it yet, so the teens fill their time by flirting, fighting, and forming plans for the long weekend ahead—until a more sinister probability comes into view. This gut-punch of a comedy interrogates how a racialized public school system fails its students by design, who gets the chance to escape it, and what they must leave behind to do so. Performances start in September 2024.
Summer, 1976, by David Auburn. Directed by Vivienne Benesch. Starring Holly Twyford and Kate Eastwood Norris. It’s midsummer in the mid-seventies—the second wave of feminism is cresting somewhere while two very different women are thrown into one another’s orbit in college-town Ohio. Iconoclast artist Diana looks down on faculty wife Alice, but their young daughters’ friendship forces them together. Featuring two tour-de-force performances by DC favorites Holly Twyford and Kate Eastman Norris, David Auburn’s (Proof) recent Broadway hit traces each woman’s growing disquiet with the compromises they’ve made, and the transformative power of a friendship at the right time. Performances start in November 2024.
Downstate, by Bruce Norris. Directed by David Muse. Downstate is a button-pushing play from provocateur Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park) that looks at the limits of compassion, the desire for retribution, and what happens when society decides some acts are unforgivable. In downstate Illinois, at a group home for registered sex offenders, four men are living with the realities of post-incarcerated life: ankle monitors, no internet, and no shopping at stores closer than 2,500 feet from playgrounds. When a man shows up to confront the piano teacher convicted of molesting him as a child, events begin to build to an explosive conclusion in this riveting play that the New York Times calls “a squirmy moral thrill-ride.” Performances start in January 2025.
The Scenarios, by Matthew Capodicasa. World premiere. Angie, an actor, has just landed her weirdest gig yet: improvising scenes with active-duty cops, helping to train them to respond to people in acute mental crisis. But when the backstage tensions and workplace hijinks begin to pull focus from the training’s actual goal—to save lives—Angie tries making things a little more real. Funny and compassionate, this world premiere looks at the intricacies of empathy and asks what it costs to pretend to be someone else. Performances start in March 2025.
Paradise Blue, by Dominique Morisseau. Directed by Raymond O. Caldwell. Detroit, 1949. Welcome to Paradise, a jazz club that’s seen better days. Blue, the club’s trumpet-playing owner is ready to leave this town and his family demons behind. But his house band and his best girl have dreams of their own, so when hardboiled widow Silver enters the picture looking for some business and some pleasure, love, lust, and legacy collide in the fight for Paradise. Studio transforms the Victor Shargai Theatre into a jazz club for Dominique Morisseau’s (Pipeline, Skeleton Crew) music-filled drama about resilience, self-preservation, and community. Performances start in May 2025.
Wipeout, by Aurora Real de Asua. Directed by Danilo Gambini. Claudia is giving herself an early birthday present: surf lessons. Floating in the Pacific isn’t entirely her speed, but she’s grounded her drifting friendship triad for years, and birthday celebration is a surefire way to get both of her best friends to show up. Joined by a surfbro instructor, Claudia and her friends face their Golden Years by catching some waves, settling some scores, and navigating their smallness in the vastness of the ocean and life. A funny and moving play about endings and beginnings. Performances start in June, 2025.
ABOUT STUDIO THEATRE
Studio Theatre is a longstanding Washington cultural institution dedicated to the production of contemporary theater. Over more than 45 years and 375 productions, the theater has grown from a company that produced in a single rented theater to one that owns a multi-venue complex stretching half a city block, but has stayed committed to its core distinguishing characteristics: deliberately intimate spaces; excellence in acting and design; and seasons that feature many of the most significant playwrights of our time. Studio is a values-focused organization that pursues artistry and inclusion, and brings characteristic thoughtfulness and daring to its efforts, onstage and off. The theater serves nearly 40,000 people each year, including more than 1,000 youth and young adults through community engagement initiatives. Founded in 1978, the quality of Studio’s work has been recognized by sustained community support, as well as 78 Helen Hayes Awards for excellence in professional theater.
