As the new Chair of the Department of Theater Studies, it is my pleasure to welcome you to our 2025-26 season. I am a scholar of theater history, and as someone who has spent much of my career thinking about the power of theater to shape collective memory and identities, I feel privileged to be part of this department at such an important moment in its creative journey.
Each season offers an opportunity to reflect on why theater matters—why we gather in shared space to witness stories unfold live before us. The 2025–26 season explores this question with urgency and artistic ambition. Each production asks timely, unsettling questions about who we are, what we remember, and how we remain resilient in moments of uncertainty and rupture.
Directed by Jeff Storer, the Mainstage fall show, Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, takes us into a post-apocalyptic future where survivors cling to fragments of pop culture to make sense of their past. When their world ends, they must decide what to remember, what to forget—and what new myths to create. The spring Mainstage production features Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, adapted by our own Neal Bell and directed by Jonathan Cullen, who returns as artist-in-residence. When it premiered in 1921 in Rome, the play caused a scandal, with some audience members shouting “madhouse!” while others cheered. Its bold experimentation with theatrical form and questions of reality, authorship, and truth continue to resonate more than a century later.
The season also features a dynamic lineup of Duke Players productions and new works by faculty and visiting artists. The year begins with Duke Players’ production of No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, presented as part of Duke Arts Week. These productions, along with our curriculum in acting, design, directing, playwriting, and theater history, underscore the Department’s commitment to theater as an art of action and inquiry.
Together, our courses and productions offer powerful reflections on what it means to tell—and retell—stories in challenging times. I am honored to share this season with you as we continue to build a community where students, faculty, visiting artists, and audiences come together through the transformative power of theater.
Esther Kim Lee, Chair