American Players Theatre announces 2025 season

The American Players Theatre (APT) announced the lineup for its 2025 season on Oct. 24. The nine plays that comprise APT's 46th season in Spring Green range from a classic Shakespearean show to a parody of Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 spy thriller "The 39 Steps."

In mid-June 2025, things kick off where they so often have for the theater company: With a production of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  This classic tale of fairy kingdoms and star-crossed couples is one of APT’s most-produced shows. The company last staged it in 2017, inaugurating its newly renovated stage space with a luminous and colorful production that featured Cristina Panfilio as Puck and APT Core Company members Gavin Lawrence and Colleen Madden as Oberon and Titania. The 2025 version will be directed by another Core Company member — David Daniel.

In the company’s typical "comedy of manners" (a genre of comedy that satirizes social conventions) slot, APT is staging witty British playwright Noël Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” a lark about a pair of wives whose premarital sex shenanigans catch up with them, much to the chagrin of their husbands. Shannan Cochran makes her directorial debut.  APT last staged a Coward play in 2015 (“Private Lives”).

The final outdoor show of the company’s first wave of shows is “Picnic,” a play that won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for its author, William Inge. APT’s artistic director Brenda DeVita will direct the show, which deals with a family whose daughters’ lives and engagements are upended by the arrival of an attractive drifter.

The company’s second wave of outdoor shows begins in August with another Pulitzer winner — “Anna in the Tropics,” by Nilo Cruz. Cruz’s 2003 work concerns Cuban immigrants working in a cigar factory, and, oddly enough, the Tolstoy novel “Anna Karenina.” Robert Ramirez, who directed this season’s production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” will direct.

The outdoor season wraps up with a Shakespeare play the company hasn’t staged since way back in 2009 — “The Winter’s Tale,” the problematic story of a Sicilian king who learns there’s a steep cost for indulging unproven jealousy, especially when that indulgence includes abandoning your infant daughter in the woods. Shana Cooper will direct.

In the indoor Touchstone Theater, the season begins with the world premiere of APT Core Company member Gavin Dillion Lawrence’s original play “The Death of Chuck Brown.” Brown, a guitarist and singer known as “the Godfather of Go-Go,” created his unique spin on funk music in the 1970s in Washington, D.C., the city where Lawrence spent much of his childhood. Brown died in 2012, but both a city street and a park in the DC area commemorate his name. Lawrence’s play seems to incorporate elements of “The Barber and the Unnamed Prince,” a play about a barbershop owner and his teenage son he wrote that was part of APT’s 2023 Winter Words series.

Next up is playwright Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” a French play about a trio of friends who devolve into arguments and recriminations when one of them buys an expensive but dubious painting that features a white canvas with a few thin lines. The director of this show is yet to be determined.

The Touchstone’s regular season warps up with British playwright Nina Raine’s “Tribes,” a play about a Jewish family whose deaf son meets and falls in love with a woman who teaches him sign language against his family’s wishes Longtime APT director John Langs is at the helm.

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