Memberships for the 2022/23 Season

By James Ijames
Directed by Whitney White
Featuring ensemble member Celeste M. Cooper

September 1 – October 9, 2022
in the Downstairs Theater 

The recently widowed “Mother of America” lies alone in her Mount Vernon bed, ravaged by illness and attended to by the very same enslaved people who will be free the moment she dies. The form-shifting fever dream that follows takes us deep into the uncomfortable and horrific ramifications of this country’s original sin. Dizzying and fantastical, this skewering Chicago premiere from James Ijames’s daring voice puts the American myth on trial.

By Vichet Chum
Directed by Jesca Prudencio

December 1, 2022 – January 15, 2023
in the Ensemble Theater in Honor of Helen Zell

Ma is dead; now what happens? Vichet Chum’s world premiere follows two sisters—at odds since birth—as they settle the affairs of their strong-willed, wise-cracking mother while reconciling their family’s Cambodian heritage with its ever-so-complicated American present. Where’s the will? A burial or cremation? And what do we do with Ma’s teeth? Bald Sisters is an irreverent, comic and ultimately poignant examination of the ties that bind multigenerational families of immigrants together: history, spirituality and humor.

By ensemble member Rajiv Joseph
Directed by ensemble member Austin Pendelton

March 2 – April 9, 2023
in the Ensemble Theater in Honor of Helen Zell

Truth is lie; lie is truth. Russia, 1920: Jewish writer Isaac Babel begins a journal while serving in war. Ninety years later, this same journal is found in the wreckage of a suspicious plane crash. What did Babel write, and why does it matter? Ensemble member Rajiv Joseph’s sweeping and arresting epic follows the unlikely lives of seven Russians—soldiers and poets, KGB agents and babushkas—as they unearth mysteries buried by decades of history, fiction and blood.

By Donnetta Lavinia Grays
Directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton
Featuring ensemble member Namir Smallwood

April 6 – May 14, 2023
in the Downstairs Theater

Monique is on the run. From what, she will not say. Showing up on the doorstep of her sister’s Brooklyn brownstone with her timid daughter Sam—and without her husband—their arrival raises more questions than it answers. As the specter of their abandoned life in Georgia creeps back into focus, the family is forced to consider what must be sacrificed to break a cycle of despair. Poetic and heartbreaking, Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s stunning portrait of Black Love explores what it takes to nurture family in an often-cruel world.

By ensemble member Kate Arrington
Directed by ensemble member Terry Kinney

June 15 – July 23, 2023
in the Ensemble Theater in Honor of Helen Zell

You meet. You marry. You have kids. That’s the way it always goes. Or is it? What if your story changes? What would it cost? Another Marriage is an intimate and beautifully rendered portrait of an ever-evolving relationship that may never be quite finished. Ensemble member Kate Arrington’s playwriting debut upends the typical romantic comedy to explore the liabilities of falling in and out of love—and time.

By Harold Pinter
Directed by Les Waters
Featuring ensemble members Austin Pendleton and Jeff Perry

July 13 – August 20, 2023
in the Downstairs Theater

In the drawing room of his stately Hampstead mansion, the wealthy, aging Hirst hosts his newfound acquaintance, the enigmatic Spooner, for an evening of endless beer, scotch and vodka. The night winds on, the drinks keep pouring and the ground keeps shifting—until two sinister younger men arrive and interrupt the bacchanal. Steppenwolf returns to Harold Pinter’s modern masterpiece: a generational power struggle, a tug of war between expert wordsmiths, a maze of murky meaning. Or perhaps it's just two old English sots waxing nostalgic and waiting for the sun to rise. In No Man’s Land, you can never be certain, and nothing is at is seems.