WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME | NOISE | THE FATHER: A TRAGIC FARCE | FAT HAM | AMERICAN IDIOT
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2025/26 Memberships
Get your Early Bird Memberships for our 2025/26 season and save! Memberships include admission to all 2025/26 Main Series productions, to be announced later this spring, and additional benefits including free admission to additional performances added throughout the year, and access to 'member-only' special events. Get yours now and never miss a thing
LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR 2024/25 MAIN SERIES:
RHODE ISLAND PREMIERE OF A GROUNDBREAKING WORK
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2024
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2024
Pulitzer Prize Finalist and winner of the Obie Award for Best New American Play, Heidi Schreck’s boundary-breaking WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME breathes new life into our Constitution and imagines how it will shape the next generation of Americans. Fifteen-year-old Heidi earned her college tuition by winning Constitutional debate competitions across the United States. In this hilarious, hopeful and achingly human new play, she resurrects her teenage self in order to trace the profound relationship between four generations of women and the founding document that shaped their lives.
“What the Constitution Means to Me is one of the things we always say we want theater to be: an act of civic engagement. It restarts an argument many of us forgot we even needed to have.”
– The New York Times
“What the Constitution Means to Me is one of the things we always say we want theater to be: an act of civic engagement. It restarts an argument many of us forgot we even needed to have.”
– The New York Times
A BRAND NEW MUSICAL FROM THE MIND BEHIND FUTURITY
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2024
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2024
NOISE follows a group of musicians who agree that society isn't working. Since civilization is found in its earliest form in musical structure, they figure they should be able to make some music that reflects a society they'd actually like to live in. Like, right now. In this musical...
César Alvarez is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance maker. They create big experimental gatherings disguised as musicals, in the key of inter-dimensionality, socio-political transformation, kinship and coexistence. With a background as a jazz saxophonist, bandleader and sound artist, César's work inhabits a space between the worlds of theater, music, performance art and social practice. César was a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow, a recipient of The Jonathan Larson Award in 2016, The Kleban Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022. Originally commissioned by The Public Theater and Playwrights Horizons Theater School/NYU, this production of Noise is presented by Wilbury Theatre Group in collaboration with Spirits Go Blah productions, New York.
“A celebration of music’s transcendent powers. Don’t worry about why you’re getting uplifted, just surrender.” – The Village Voice review of César Alvarez’s Futurity
César Alvarez is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance maker. They create big experimental gatherings disguised as musicals, in the key of inter-dimensionality, socio-political transformation, kinship and coexistence. With a background as a jazz saxophonist, bandleader and sound artist, César's work inhabits a space between the worlds of theater, music, performance art and social practice. César was a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow, a recipient of The Jonathan Larson Award in 2016, The Kleban Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022. Originally commissioned by The Public Theater and Playwrights Horizons Theater School/NYU, this production of Noise is presented by Wilbury Theatre Group in collaboration with Spirits Go Blah productions, New York.
“A celebration of music’s transcendent powers. Don’t worry about why you’re getting uplifted, just surrender.” – The Village Voice review of César Alvarez’s Futurity
NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE
JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2025
JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2025
Now 80 years old, André was once a tap dancer. He lives with his daughter, Anne, and her husband, Antoine. Or was André an engineer, whose daughter Anne lives in London with her new lover, Pierre? The thing is, he is still wearing his pajamas, and he can’t find his watch. He is starting to wonder if he’s losing control.
Featuring Richard Donelly (The Caretaker) in the titular role and directed by Artistic Director Josh Short in its New England premiere, The Father is a harrowing insight into the aging process.
“Hugely rewarding…an astonishingly unguarded play about the cruelties of love and the limits of patience and the way child-parent relationships become inverted as old age creeps up and mugs us.” —The Guardian
Featuring Richard Donelly (The Caretaker) in the titular role and directed by Artistic Director Josh Short in its New England premiere, The Father is a harrowing insight into the aging process.
“Hugely rewarding…an astonishingly unguarded play about the cruelties of love and the limits of patience and the way child-parent relationships become inverted as old age creeps up and mugs us.” —The Guardian
RHODE ISLAND PREMIERE OF THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNING PLAY
MARCH / APRIL 2025
MARCH / APRIL 2025
Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, James Ijames' Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare's Hamlet in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbecue in the American South. Juicy—a young, queer, Southern man, who is grappling with questions of identity—is visited by the ghost of his father (Pap) at his mother’s wedding/family barbecue. Pap demands that Juicy avenge his recent murder. How will Juicy, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man, trying to break a cycle of trauma and toxic masculinity, avenge his father’s premature death?
"Structured like an improvisational jazz riff on Shakespeare…Fat Ham practices what it preaches by lavishing laughter and delight as it encourages us to take our destinies caressingly in hand." – The New York Times
"Structured like an improvisational jazz riff on Shakespeare…Fat Ham practices what it preaches by lavishing laughter and delight as it encourages us to take our destinies caressingly in hand." – The New York Times
A ROCK OPERA BASED ON GREEN DAY'S SEMINAL 2004 ALBUM
MAY / JUNE 2025
MAY / JUNE 2025
American Idiot, Green Day's Grammy Award-winning, multi-platinum album released in 2004, follows the exhilarating journey of a new generation of young Americans as they struggle to find meaning in a post 9/11 world. The subsequent Broadway musical featured the iconic album hits "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," "21 Guns," "Wake Me Up When September Ends," "Holiday," and the blockbuster title track, "American Idiot". The show includes every song from the renowned record plus several songs from Green Day's 2009 album, “21st Century Breakdown,” and a previously unreleased love song entitled, "When It's Time.”
The New York Times calls American Idiot, “Thrillingly raucous and gorgeously wrought…served straight up, with each sneering lyric and snarling riff in place…A pulsating portrait of wasted youth.” The San Francisco Chronicle says: “Packs plenty of excitement and entertainment into a remarkably theatrical rock concert…Every poetic twist and angry pun of Armstrong's words comes through with greater clarity.”
The New York Times calls American Idiot, “Thrillingly raucous and gorgeously wrought…served straight up, with each sneering lyric and snarling riff in place…A pulsating portrait of wasted youth.” The San Francisco Chronicle says: “Packs plenty of excitement and entertainment into a remarkably theatrical rock concert…Every poetic twist and angry pun of Armstrong's words comes through with greater clarity.”
Don't Miss the 2024/25 Season
Join us at for Season 15 at Providence's home for groundbreaking artists and adventurous audiences. Membership includes admission to our 2024/25 Main Series productions and special events, including Rhode Island premieres of Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me, César Alvarez's acclaimed new musical Noise, Christopher Hampton's translation of The Father: A Tragic Farce by Florian Zeller featuring Richard Donelly, James Ijames' Pulitzer Prize-winning Fat Ham, and an additional play for our 2024/25 Main Series Season to-be-announced!
Become a Member for our 2024/25 Season today and never miss a thing.
Become a Member for our 2024/25 Season today and never miss a thing.
ABOUT
An award-winning*, not-for-profit professional theatre company, the Wilbury Theatre Group engages our community in thought-provoking conversation through new works, reimagined classics and adventurous playmaking. We are idealistic, ambitious, and stubborn in our resolve to create theatre that entertains, enlightens, and inspires.
*WINNER of the 2018 National Theatre Company Award from the American Theatre Wing (The Tony Awards).
*WINNER of the 2018 National Theatre Company Award from the American Theatre Wing (The Tony Awards).
