CSU Theatre is proud to announce our 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 seasons!
2024-2025: Reforming the Classics: Wishes, Wrights and Wrongs
Playwrights write stories for the stage that offer us chances to better understand the human condition. Theatre artists often return to past works to wrestle with their universal themes and tease out new meanings for the present day. How do extraordinary works from the past engage with contemporary audiences? Our 2024-2025 season is dedicated to exploring that question through some tall tales about morality, mortality…and mayhem!
Fall 2024 begins with Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a modern retelling of the 15th-century morality tale, The Summoning Of Everyman. Join Friendship, Kinship, Stuff, Mind, Five Senses, and Understanding as they guide Everybody on their journey through life and destiny and towards Love. Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays with fate through a casting lottery system and muses on the immorality of racism of our times. This production is Prof. Javier Hurtado’s directorial debut at CSU.
Paired with this morality tale is Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. This mythic musical intertwines the plots of several Grimm fairytales as it examines the consequences of our human wishes and quests. As each character utters the words “I wish…” we follow them into the realm of the subconscious woods. In the unreal, mythic world of the fairytale, we come to see our humanity more clearly. Into the Woods will be directed by CSU’s head of Musical Theatre, Prof. Noah Racey.
Spring 2025 begins with a tale that upends the story of the boy who would not grow up: Peter Pan. In Peter & the Starcatcher by Rick Elice, marauding pirates, jungle tyrants, unwilling comrades, and unlikely heroes playfully explore the depths of greed and despair… and the bonds of friendship, duty, and love. Director Wesley Longacre invites you to come creatively reimagine using ingenious stagecraft and the magic of starstuff.
We end the 2024-2025 season with one of the most famous poems in the English language, John Milton’s 17th-century tale Paradise Lost, an epic story about fallen angels and faulty humans searching for meaning through our temptations. In Erin Shields’ adaptation for the stage, Lucifer is a woman cast out of Heaven, who crafts a plan for revenge and betrayal on the Almighty. Prof. Debbie Swann directs Shields’s wickedly smart script, where the debate over right and wrong has never been so tantalizing.
Our mainstage season is augmented by our On the Brink reading series, aimed at amplifying marginalized voices and exposing students to a diverse array of BIPOC, queer, and women artists from around the nation and the world. Directors include Prof. Saffron Henke, Dr. Javier Hurtado, and special guests.
Throughout the season, we will also celebrate the work of our students in our Showcase Series. This series of free events, open to the public include a Verbatim Theatre project devised by first-year students; shared scenes from our acting, directing, and playwriting classes; the Monologue Festival, and 10-minute plays from our playwriting students. Come witness the magic of storytelling-in-progress!
2025-2026: Imagined Worlds & Devised Dreams
Part of CSU Theatre’s mission is to make innovative, creative work that imagines new worlds and new possibilities. This season is dedicated to such imaginings.
Once upon a time, in a fishing village along the Amazon, sisters Helena and Belmira wish for their “happily ever after.” The River Bride by Marisela Treviño Orta opens our Fall 2025 season. Treviño Orta blends Brazilian folklore and lyric storytelling into a poignant tale of true love, regret, and transformation. When a mystery emerges from the river, a fable takes flight. A mysterious stranger offers the sisters a tempting, but risky future. How do they follow their hearts, while also honoring their family and home? Directed by Javier Hurtado, The River Bride starts our season with an imagination piqued through the magic of theatre.
The River Bride will include a visit from playwright Marisela Treviño Orta.
There’s no greater way to experience theatre magic than through devised theatre-making. Devising, as the name suggests, is an extended process of collective creation. In Fall 2025, an ensemble of creators—performers, designers, managers, and dreamers—will share an immersive performance developed for over a year and a half. The Devised Immersive Project, spearheaded by Profs. Saffron Henke and Roger Hanna, combines student-driven design and creative story generation. Students will envision a series of performance installations that immerse audiences in a sensory storytelling landscape to move through, explore, and experience. We invite you to stroll through a fantasy world fashioned entirely from student creativity and daring dreams!
This project will be paired with screenings of a documentary film, Devising Gilgamesh: Collage Theatre-making with Theatre Novi Most (2014) by CSU Theatre’s own Dr. Megan Lewis.
In Spring 2026, join us as we “discover” our Colorado history…and imagine history in an entirely novel way! Men On Boats by Jaclyn Backhaus is the true(ish) history of an 1869 expedition when a one-armed captain and a crew of wacky volunteers set out to chart the course of the Colorado River. Through this play, Backhaus invites us to consider how history is written, who writes it, and what happens when the cocky and clueless explorations of the past are navigated by contemporary women. Directed by Dr. Wesley Longacre.
We close the 2025-2026 season with Rent, Jonathan Larson’s rock musical about a community of young artists struggling to stay warm, make art, and dream big in bohemian Alphabet City, under the shadow of a plague. An adaptation of Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La bohème, Rent won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1996. Please join us as we live every moment as if it were our last and measure our human capacity for love.
Our On the Brink reading series will continue to amplify marginalized voices and exposes students to an array of BIPOC, queer, and women artists from around the nation and the world throughout the 2025-2026 season. Directors include Prof. Saffron Henke, Dr. Javier Hurtado, and special guests.
We will also continue to celebrate the work of our students through our Showcase Series.
NOTE: While we planned our season two years in advance, adjustments may be made to the 2025-2026 season as circumstances require and as we attempt to obtain rights.