- Follow
»Theatre Productions
We're proud to present the the following productions during the 2025–2026 academic year! To attend or learn more:
- Tickets go on sale at the start of every semester. You can purchase tickets here for all College of Performing Arts events.
- Follow along during the production process, learn more about the experience of Chapman Theatre students, and get a behind-the-scenes peek of each of our productions on our College of Performing Arts Instagram.
FALL 2025
A play based on the book of the same name written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Adapted by Rick Cummins and John Scoullar
September 25–27, 2025
Musco Center for the Arts
The Little Prince may have returned to his own tiny planet to tend his Rose and look after his Sheep, but for a short, enchanted time he returns to us and comes alive on stage. This play/musical tells the story of a world-weary and disenchanted Aviator whose sputtering plane strands him in the Sahara Desert. A mysterious, regal "little man" appears and asks him to "Please, sir, draw me a sheep." During their two weeks together in the desert, the Little Prince tells the Aviator about his adventures through the galaxy, how he met the Lamplighter and the Businessman and the Geographer, and about his strained relationship with a very special flower on his own tiny planet. The Little Prince talks to everyone he meets: a garden of roses, the Snake, and a Fox who wishes to be tamed. From each he gains a unique insight which he shares with the Aviator: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly." "What is essential is invisible to the eye." At length, both the "little man" and the Aviator must go home—each with a new understanding of how to laugh, cry, and love again.
Translated by Phili Vellacot
October 31–November 1 & November 6–8, 2025
Waltmar Theatre
In a compelling tale of passion and betrayal, Euripides' titular character Medea is a sorceress facing the ultimate betrayal from her husband Jason. After forsaking her homeland and family, Medea's love for Jason turns to rage when he abandons her for a younger lover and the promise of power. Fueled by the need for justice, Medea embarks on a chilling path of revenge, showcasing a woman's strength and defiance in the face of societal constraints. Her actions reveal the devastating consequences of betrayal and the lengths to which one can go when consumed by anger. The timeless themes of power, gender, passion, and betrayal in the ancient text of Medea are reconsidered in this production's contemporary adaptation of the setting.
SPRING 2026
February 20–21 & February 26–28, 2026
Waltmar Theatre
While playwright Georg Büchner did not finish Woyzeck before his untimely death at the age of 24, the various drafts of Büchner's play were discovered and reconstructed by a team of playwrights, editors, and translators working together and the play was finally published in 1879, forty-two years after Büchner's death. Woyzeck is now considered a forerunner of the movements of expressionism and naturalism, and a precursor to modern drama as we know it today. Since its stage premiere in 1913, Woyzeck has become an important and influential piece of drama. A working-class tragedy of relevance in the nineteenth century and today, Woyzeck reveals the way ideologies reflected in societal institutions such as the healthcare system, military, and church are used to perpetuate and maintain systems of inequity and injustice.
Student Directed One-Acts
April 9–12, 2026
O.L. Halsell Foundation Studio Theatre
Theatre students direct and perform a series of one-act plays, staged in the O.L. Halsell Foundation Studio Theatre. Titles to be announced.
Directed by Nikki DiLoreto
May 1–2 & May 7–9, 2026
Waltmar Theatre
Re-imagined with all-female or gender non-binary actors playing the roles of historic explorers, Men on Boats is the true(ish) history of the 1869 expedition led by one-armed war veteran Captain John Wesley Powell and his crew of unhinged-yet-loyal volunteers to chart the hidden course of the untamed Colorado River. Critically acclaimed for its feminist revisionist approach to history, the play explores the humanity and consequences of settlers' expansion into the western United States.
Past Productions
2024-25
FALL 2024
The Rover by Aphra Behn
Directed by Erin O'Neill
October 4-5 & October 10-12, 2024
Waltmar Theatre
Amid the fast and furious world of the carnival, three wandering cavaliers roam in exile whilst three women looking for love and fighting for a little freedom explore this vibrant, frenzied, dizzying world.
Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Directed by Amanda McRaven
November 1–2 & November 7-9, 2024
Waltmar Theatre
This modern riff on the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman follows Everybody (chosen from amongst the cast by lottery at each performance) as they journey through life’s greatest mystery—the meaning of living. Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
SPRING 2025
Ride the Cyclone - Book, music, and lyrics by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell
Directed by Nick Gabriel
February 20-22, 2025
Musco Center for the Arts
In this hilarious and outlandish story, the lives of six teenagers are cut short in a freak accident aboard a roller coaster. When they awake in limbo, a mechanical fortune teller invites each to tell a story to win a prize like no other — the chance to return to life. This popular musical is a funny, moving look at what makes a life well-lived!
Student-Directed One-Acts
April 10-13, 2025
O.L. Halsell Foundation Studio Theatre
Theatre students direct and perform a series of one-act plays, staged in the O.L.
Halsell Foundation Studio Theatre.
BACHELOR HOLIDAY
Written by: Alan Ball
Directed by: Izzy Geldbach
HUNTER/HUNTED
Written & Directed by Karli Jean Lonnquist
WANDA'S VISIT
Written by: Christopher Durang
Directed by: Annabella McConnell
OVERTONES
Written by: Alice Gerstenberg
Directed by: Paige Shubert
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov (adapted by Annie Baker)
Directed by Beth Lopes
May 2-3 & May 8-10, 2025
Waltmar Theatre
This intimate, immersive new adaptation of Chekhov’s classic from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker brings colloquial language to this internationally beloved story of human relationships and yearning. Written with the “goal of creating a version that sounds to our contemporary American ears the way the play sounded to Russian ears during the play’s first productions in the provinces in 1898,” Annie Baker’s Uncle Vanya introduces twenty-first century audiences to Chekhov’s enduring wit, insight, and emotional depth.
2023-24
Small Mouth Sounds by Bess Wohl
Directed by Gregg W. Brevoort
Filled with awkward and insightful humor, this show takes the audience on a unique journey of human discovery where strangers confront their internal demons through profound and absurd vows of silence.
Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht (English version by Eric Bentley)
Directed by Shinshin Yuder Tsai
A war-torn wasteland is the scene of Brecht’s Epic Theatre masterpiece, a powerful anti-war drama which follows the misfortunes and triumphs of Anna Fierling, nicknamed “Mother Courage,” and her misplaced children. As they traverse the apocalyptic ruins of their world, their survival is dependent on the very cataclysm that destroyed their previous life. It’s an edgy, raw, transformative journey that will shake your senses.
Twelfth Night, or What You Will by William Shakespeare
Directed by Tamiko S. Washington
This hilarious rom/com features mistaken identities and a love triangle for a cross-dressing, ship-wreck surviving, poetry-loving girl. Filled with music, drink, dance, riotous antics and self-indulgences, this is a masterful show you don't want to miss!
Student-Directed One-Acts
Kissing Scene by Carl Martin
Directed by Jane Broderson
Trifles by Susan Glaspell
Directed by Sydney Feldman
Icarus's Mother by Sam Shepard
Directed by Jerry Zou
The Storm in the Barn adapted by Eric Coble, from the graphic novel by Matt Phelan
Directed by Jeremie Loncka
It is 1937, the height of the infamous Dust Bowl era, and a young boy named Jack Clark, who lives a life of daily bullying, familial poverty struggles and challenges of youth, finds solace and hope when he encounters a fantastical and mystical presence in a barn that changes his and his family’s life forever. Based on the graphic novel The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan.
2022-23
Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman
Directed by Shinshin Tsai
Metamorphoses is based on Ovid's fifteen-volume work of transformation myths. Positioned in and around a large pool on the stage, the characters enact Zimmerman's adaptations of Ovid's tales, juxtaposing the ancient and the contemporary in both language and image.
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Directed by Michael Nehring
This metatheatrical three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Stephen Simons
Directed by Sokratis Alafouzos
The play tells the story of Christopher Boone, a mathematically gifted boy of 15 years, whose investigations of ordinary life, which is difficult for him to understand, lead him to uncover a variety of family secrets and eventually struggle against the personal, developmental limitations on his independence.
Student-Directed One-Act: The Yellow Boat by David Saar
Directed by Kennedy Kemmerer
This glorious affirmation of a child’s life, and the strength and courage of all children, is a dramatization of the true story of David and Sonja Saar’s son, Benjamin, who was born with congenital hemophilia and died in 1987 at the age of eight of AIDS-related complications. A uniquely gifted visual artist, Benjamin’s buoyant imagination transformed his physical and emotional pain into a blaze of colors and shapes in his fanciful drawings and paintings.
Freaky Friday
Book by Bridget Carpenter
Music by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey
Directed by Susanna Vaughan
Single mother Tess Coleman and her teenage daughter Anna couldn't be more different, and it is driving them both insane. After receiving cryptic fortunes at a Chinese restaurant, the two wake up the next day to discover that they have somehow switched bodies. Unable to switch back, they are forced to masquerade as one another until a solution can be found. In the process, they develop a new sense of respect and understanding for one another.
2021-22
Tartuffe
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Native Gardens
Horse Girls
Zanna Don’t!A Musical Fairytale
2020-21
In the Next Room, or the vibrator play
EQUalITY, a devised performance
The Theory of Relativity
Student Directed One-Acts
Lonesome Hollow
Home Unchained: A Night of Devised Theatre
