This season is a reminder of why theatre exists, and why we do the work that we do. There is no substitute for being in the room when a story finds its audience for the first time, and this year, we're proud to bring Providence this selection of world, regional, and Rhode Island premieres...These are playwrights whose work is critical right now — new, urgent, and unafraid of what theatre can be. That's not incidental to our mission. It is our mission.

WORLD PREMIERE OF A NEW PLAY BY DON MAYS

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2026

Providence, 1993. A gang leader from Harlem arrives at his ex-girlfriend's apartment in the middle of the night — wounded, on the run, with nowhere else to go. What he doesn't know is that her roommate is gay, grieving, and not about to back down. Set against the twin epidemics of AIDS and drug violence, Don Mays's world premiere is a funny, fierce, and deeply human play about two men the world treated as disposable who are certain they have nothing in common — and the woman standing between them who can see exactly who they both are. 
 
Don Mays is a recent collaborator with Wilbury Theatre Group, recently directing productions of The Comeuppance by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Fat Ham by James Iames and the World Premiere of Silhouette of a Silhouette by Rose Weaver.  Mays is also the creator of the Webby-Award winning podcast, God Talks to an Agnostic which aired on Rhode Island's Public Radio and was recently adapted into a film.

BY BETH HYLAND

NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2026

Beth Hyland takes Chekhov's most heartbreaking play and strips it to its bones, reimagined as four college musicians, two love triangles, one industry predator, and a lot of songs played live by the actors performing them. A new musical about ambition, desire, and the particular damage done to young women who want things in a world not built to protect them. Wilbury’s production will see the show’s original director, Rebecca Willingham, return to the helm for the production's New England premiere.
 
Seagulls was previously produced at The Sound at Steppenwolf LookOut, Octagon Bolton and Oak Park Festival Theatre in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune said of the production: “Hyland’s indie rock adaptation of the 1896 Russian play reaches for emotional depth and artistic sensibility…with sharply insightful lines and lyrics…prompting a re-examination of how the music industry and broader society treat women in the spotlight.”  Chicago Onstage adds, “Seagulls crackles with an undeniable energy.”

BY BESS WOHL

JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2027

After fifty years of marriage, Bill and Nancy want a divorce. Their adult sons are devastated. Nancy, it turns out, is just getting started. From Tony and Pulitzer Prize Award-winning playwright Bess Wohl (Liberation) and starring Richard Donelly and Phyllis Kay in a production directed by Artistic Director Josh Short, Grand Horizons is a ferociously funny and quietly devastating play exploring the cost of intimacy, what it conceals, and what becomes possible when someone finally stops performing a life that isn't theirs.
 
New York Times calls Grand Horizons “Perfectly structured, mimicking the classic works of stage comedy" and regards Wohl as “One of our cleverest playwrights.” Broadway News said of the original production, "A supremely funny comedy of marital malaise...that rare animal, a smart but crowd-friendly comedy, one that does not pander to the audience, and finds twisty new paths through familiar pastures."  Wilbury previously produced Bess Wohl’s Small Mouth Sounds as part of the 2025/26 Season. 

BY ANNIE BAKER

MARCH / APRIL 2027

Nine writers sit around a conference table and try to crack a story. Takeout gets ordered. Confessions get made. People disappear. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Annie Baker, one of the most precise theatrical minds working in America today, puts a room full of people under pressure and waits to see what's left when the structure falls away. The Antipodes is funny, strange, mythological, and one of the most underproduced great plays of the last decade.
 
Timeout calls The Antipodes; "An intensely vivid, hypnotizing act disguised as a play." The New Yorker adds “Baker has pioneered a style of theatre made to seem as untheatrical as possible, while using the tools of the stage to focus audience attention... to watch Baker's work is to be drawn into a world that feels as unplotted as real life, but that breaks abruptly into surreal transcendence."

Wilbury previously produced Annie Baker’s The Flick (2017/18 Season) and Body Awareness (2012/13 Season).

BOOK & MUSIC BY ANNA K. JACOBS
​BOOK & LYRICS BY MICHAEL R. JACKSON

MAY / JUNE 2027

Dawn O'Keefe is an evangelical Christian teenager with a secret she doesn't fully understand: when men violate her, her body bites back. Literally. Michael R. Jackson, Pulitzer Prize winner for A Strange Loop, and Anna K. Jacobs have made something fierce and rapturous and savagely funny out of the cult film of the same name: a dark comedy about religious repression, bodily autonomy, and ancient rage.
 
Based on the 2007 horror-comedy cult classic film, Teeth premiered off-Broadway in 2024 at Playwright’s Horizons and received two extensions before moving to New World Stages. Vulture called the production “A bloody, bawdy musical... with banging songs.”  TheatreMania adds, “A must-see musical…Riotous and prescient... Unassumingly brilliant.”

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2026/27 Memberships

Get your Membership for our 2026/27 season and save! Memberships include admission to all Main Series productions and additional benefits, including free ticket exchanges, admission to additional performances added throughout the year, and access to 'member-only' special events. Get your Season Membership now and never miss a thing.

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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.

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