It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Theater Studies 2026-27 season. This year's curricular and production offerings reflect the department's mission to provide a liberal arts education guided by creative collaboration and ambitious imagination. In our classrooms, rehearsal spaces, and stages, students explore what it means to be human, to live in relation to others, and to tell—and witness—each other's stories. More than ever, we need the kind of creative intelligence that theater cultivates: the ability to imagine, interpret, empathize, and engage with complexity.
The two Mainstage productions this year revisit familiar stories for contemporary audiences. In the fall, guest director Rebecca Wahls directs Witch by Jen Silverman. The play is a reimagining of The Witch of Edmonton, a seventeenth-century drama that challenged prevailing ideas about witchcraft, gender, and social belonging. Sharp, funny, and unsettling, Silverman's play asks what it means to confront systems of power and to imagine alternative futures. The spring Mainstage production, Emma: No One But Herself, directed by Theater Studies faculty member Johann Montozzi-Wood, offers a fresh theatrical adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved novel. The musical is by Meghan Brown, with music by Sarah Taylor Ellis (T’08). Through Emma’s missteps and discoveries, the production explores the joys and complications of friendship, love, and social ambition. Austen's sharp observations of human behavior remain as engaging today as ever.
The season also highlights the department's commitment to new work and artistic collaboration. The New Works Lab features two original musicals: Betsey Brown based on the novel by Ntozake Shange in the fall and a new musical by Sarah Taylor Ellis in the spring. I am especially pleased to welcome alumni artists back to Duke, where their work creates meaningful opportunities for students to learn from and collaborate with theater makers whose creative journeys began here. The season also includes a new show by Rodolfo Robles Cruz, this year’s Artist in Residence, and a dynamic lineup of Duke Players productions, beginning with Tickless Time during Arts Week.
The season reflects the Department of Theater Studies' dedication to theater as a mode of critical and creative inquiry. Our classes and productions invite us to revisit familiar stories, imagine alternative possibilities, and participate in the creation of new ones. I am honored to share this season with you and to welcome you into a community where students, faculty, visiting artists, and audiences come together through the transformative power of theater.
Esther Kim Lee, Chair