2023-2024 SEASON
Please note that all shows in our 2023-2024 season will begin at 7:30 p.m. for evening performances and 2 p.m. for matinees.
“Mainstage” performances are included in the purchase of a season ticket. “Spotlight Series” performances are individual ticket purchases.
Mainstage 2023-2024:
Cast Announcements:
Spotlight Series (limited engagement):
THE 2023-2024 MAINSTAGE SHOWS:
TARTUFFE September 1 – 17, 2023
By Molière. Translation by Richard Wilbur.
Directed by Elisa Davis.
Tartuffe is a penniless scoundrel whom the trusting Orgon found praying in church. Taken in by his words and his pretended religious fervor, Orgon has invited the hypocrite into his home. Once established, Tartuffe proceeds to change their normal, happy mode of life into one of chaos.
KIMBERLY AKIMBO October 20 – November 5, 2023
By David Lindsay-Abaire
Directed by David Martin
Set in the wilds of suburban New Jersey, Kimberly Akimbo is a hilarious and heartrending play about a teenager with a rare condition causing her body to age faster than it should. When she and her family flee Secaucus under dubious circumstances, Kimberly is forced to reevaluate her life while contending with a hypochondriac mother, a rarely sober father, a scam-artist aunt, her own mortality and, most terrifying of all, the possibility of first love. Please note this is the play, and not the musical version of Kimberly Akimbo.
FUN HOME
March 1 – 17, 2024
Music by Jeanine Tesori, Book and Lyrics by Lisa Kron
Directed by Tiffany Schweigert
When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family’s Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality, and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father’s hidden desires. Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.
BLACK COMEDY/THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND April 19 – May 5, 2024
Peter Shaffer/Tom Stoppard
Directed by Jessica Franz-Martin
Black Comedy (Act I): Lovesick and desperate, sculptor Brindsley Miller has embellished his apartment with furniture and objects d’arte “borrowed” from the absent antique collector next door, hoping to impress his fiancée’s pompous father and a wealthy art dealer. The fussy neighbor, Harold Gorringe, returns just as a blown fuse plunges the apartment into darkness and Brindsley is revealed. Unexpected guests, aging spinsters, errant phone cords, and other snares impede his frantic attempts to return the purloined items before light is restored.
The Real Inspector Hound (Act II): Feuding theatre critics Moon and Birdboot, the first a fusty philanderer and the second a pompous and vindictive second stringer, are swept into the whodunit they are viewing. In the hilarious spoof of Agatha Christie-like melodramas that follows, the body under the sofa proves to be the missing first string critic. As mists rise about isolated Muldoon Manor, Moon and Birdfoot become dangerously implicated in the lethal activities of an escaped madman.
PIPPIN June 14 – 30, 2024
Directed by Kipp Simmons
Book by Roger O. Hirson, Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
Pippin is the story of one young man’s journey to be extraordinary. Heir to the Frankish throne, the young prince Pippin is in search of the secret to true happiness and fulfillment. He seeks it in the glories of the battlefield, the temptations of the flesh and the intrigues of political power (after disposing of his father, King Charlemagne the Great). In the end, though, Pippin finds that happiness lies not in extraordinary endeavors, but rather in the unextraordinary moments that happen every day. Pippin’s message is universal and will connect with audiences across the age spectrum.
THE 2023-2024 SPOTLIGHT SERIES SHOWS:
WE ARE BLOOD November 16-19, 2023
Written and Directed by Ryan Bernsten
A family drama horror play in the vein of August: Osage County and Hereditary. Is family forever? In this horror/thriller, a recently widowed New Yorker and her son return to rural Missouri to evict their estranged family from their childhood home. Discovering the house in disrepair and the inhabitants experimenting with occult magic, the family is forced to exorcise demons from their past. This play explores themes of loss, family trauma, and if we can ever truly escape our family history.
DADDY LONG LEGS February 16-19, 2024 (additional show added on the 19th!)
Book by John Caird, Music and Lyrics by Paul Gordon
Directed by Austin Skibbie
Jerusha Abbott is the “Oldest Orphan in the John Grier Home” until a mysterious benefactor decides to send her to college to be educated as a writer. Required to write him a letter once a month, she is never to know the benefactor’s identity – so she invents one for him: Daddy Long Legs. Although she knows that he will never respond to her letters, she grows more and more fond of this elusive and kindly “old” gentleman. But another relationship soon begins to develop in Jerusha’s life. Jervis Pendleton is the well-do-do, “youngish” uncle of one of Jerusha’s roommates, who introduces her to a world of literature, travel and adventure. Through her correspondence with Daddy Long Legs and her growing intimacy with Jervis, Jerusha’s letters chronicle her emergence as a delightfully independent “New American Woman.” Yet, there is one startling fact that Jerusha has yet to uncover – a fact that will change her life forever.
2023-2024 Special Events
OCTA is Home for the Holidays
December 15-17, 2023
Written and directed by Shelly Stewart Banks
The 2024 Buddy Awards
July 27th, 2024