ANNOUNCING OUR 2024-2025 SEASON
SUMMER 2024
KINDERKRANKENHAUS
Written and Directed by JESI BENDER
In a vaguely familiar time and place, children gathered inside the grey walls of a hospital are given diagnoses they don’t understand and told to work towards correcting their ills… or face the consequences. KINDERKRANKENHAUS explores neurodiversity, the pathologizing of difference, and the complexity of labels in a world where the unspeaking are seen as unthinking.
July 19 & 21, 2024
REGULAR SEASON - 2024-2025
KOSHER LUTHERANS
By WILLIAM MISSOURI DOWNS • Directed by ART FELSHAW
Kosher Lutherans is a curveball comedy about an infertile Jewish couple and their desperate attempts to have a baby. One day their dreams come true - they meet a young, naïve, pregnant girl from Iowa who is willing to let them adopt her out-of-wedlock baby. The only problem is the girl doesn’t know they’re Jewish. All she knows about Jews is what her farmer father told her, “They control Hollywood and killed Jesus.” In an attempt not to blow the deal, the couple decides to pose as Lutherans, leading to hysterical twists and turns and a perfect play for the holiday season.
September 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 2024
BAD SEED
By MAXWELL ANDERSON • Directed by SUZANNE RODIO
The scene is a small Southern town where Colonel and Christine Penmark live with their daughter, Rhoda. Little Rhoda Penmark is the evil queen of the story. On the surface, she is sweet, charming, full of old-fashioned graces, loved by her parents, admired by all her elders. But Rhoda’s mother has an uneasy feeling about her. When one of Rhoda’s schoolmates is mysteriously drowned at a picnic, Mrs. Penmark is alarmed. For the boy who was drowned was the one who had won the penmanship medal that Rhoda felt she deserved.
October 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 27, 2024
THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER
By BARBARA ROBINSON • Directed by KELLY DeGRACE
In this hilarious Christmas classic, a couple struggling to put on a church Christmas pageant is faced with casting the Herdman kids – probably the most inventively awful kids in history. You won't believe the mayhem – and the fun – when the Herdmans collide head-on with the story of Christmas!
December 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 2024
ABSENT FRIENDS
By ALAN AYCKBOURN • Directed by ERIC ALMLEAF
Colin must be comforted in his grief over the death of his fiancee so his friends, who never met the girl, arrange a tea party for him. Understandably they are on edge wondering what to say, but there is more to their unease: Diane and Paul, John and Evelyn, and Marge and her husband is perpetually out of circulation with trivial illnesses are all kept together by a mixture of business and cross marital emotional ties. By the time Colin arrives for tea, their tenseness contrasts dramatically with his air of cheerful relaxation. He is the only happy one among them and his happiness and insensitive analyses of their troubles causes each of them to break down.
April 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 2025
ROMANTIC FOOLS
By RICH ORLOFF • Directed by DEBORAH MARTIN
12 two-character comedies examining love, lust, dating, and romance -- from a date with a caveman (Find Me a Primitive Man) to the joys of dull sex (One Man's Secret Desire) to the surprise frustrations of having a perfect mate (The Stepford Guy). With influences of Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, Jules Feiffer, the Marx Brothers, and classic vaudeville comedy, these sketches vary in style but all celebrate the inherent comedy of male-female relationships.
June 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 2025
Players Theatre At Home
Players of Utica also has a wealth of original content — video and audio programs — that are available 24/7 exclusively on our Patreon channel.