Shows Category: 2010s

Welcome to Southie, a Boston neighborhood where a night on the town means a few rounds of bingo… where this month’s paycheck covers last month’s bills… and where Margie Walsh has just been let go from yet another job. Facing eviction and scrambling to catch a break, Margie thinks an old fling who has made it out of Southie might be her ticket to a fresh new start. But is this apparently self-made man secure enough to face his humble beginnings? Margie is about to risk what little she has left to find out. With his signature humorous glow, Lindsay-Abaire explores the struggles, shifting loyalties and unshakeable hopes that come with having next to nothing in America.

Featuring FTC advisory company members Celia Klehr and Richard Ganoung, noted Milwaukee actresses Laura Gordon and Malkia Stampley, and FTC favorite Susan Sweeney.

Ah food. . .everyone’s got a favorite dessert, a coveted midnight snack, a go-to take-out order after a stressful day, or a recipe that reminds them of home. Food is inextricably linked with first dates in restaurants, memories of summer picnics, tailgating before the big game, and holidays at grandma’s house. This year playwrights from across the country are invited to contribute to the company’s second monologue festival, focusing on engaging, embarrassing, hilarious, and heart-warming stories that revolve around food. Bring your appetite for fun and exciting new work, and enjoy a dozen monologues from our menu!

Finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, hailed as one of the “Top 10 Plays of 2011” by The New York Times, New York Magazine and Newsday

If to live is to suffer, then Joseph and Charles Douaihy are more alive than most. Their father has died in a tragic accident and their ailing uncle is losing it — putting the brothers’ once unbreakable sense of humor to the test. Amidst all this, Joseph’s eccentric boss is pressuring him to write a memoir about his family’s distant connection Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet. With unexplained chronic pain and the fate of his reeling family on his shoulders, Joseph’s health, sanity, and insurance coverage are on the line.

Stephen Karam pens a brutally funny comedy about family, culture, and how we cope with wounds that just won’t heal.

In a New York studio on the Bowery, famed abstract expressionist paint Mark Rothko asks his young assistant the loaded question, “What do you see?”

It’s 1958, and Rothko has just been offered the biggest commission in the history of modern art — a set of murals for Manhattan’s exclusive Four Seasons restaurant. When his new assistant challenges his artistic integrity, Rothko must confront his own demons or be crushed by the art world he helped create.

Buffeted by the swiftly changing cultural tides of the early 1960s, Red is a startling snapshot of a brilliant artist at the height of his fame, a play hailed as “intense and exciting” by The New York Times.

Set in 1666 Restoration England, Or, comes complete with secret agents, cross-dressing, rhyming couplets, and lovers hiding in cupboards. It’s just one night int he life of Aphra Behn, poet, spy, and soon to be the first professional female playwright.

Sprung from debtors’ prison after a disastrous overseas mission, Aphra is desperate to get out of the spy trade. Her new play has a chance at a production at one of the two London companies, but only if she can finish it by morning. Late night interruptions spring from a sudden new love, actress Nell Gwynne; a complicated royal love, King Charles II; and a very suspicious ex-love, double-agent William Scott — who may be in a plot to murder the king in the morning. Can Aphra resist Nell’s charms, save Charles’ life, win William a pardon, and launch her career, all before the sun comes up?

Forward Theater Company is proud to give theater professionals throughout southern Wisconsin an artistic home. To that end, each season the company collaborates with local playwrights to develop and showcase new work. In 2013-2014, in addition to our regular season of three main stage plays, FTC will host two staged readings of original plays – one chosen by FTC’s literary committee, and one winner of the Wisconsin Wrights New Play Project, a program administered by the UW-Madison Department of Continuing Studies.

Please join us for these world premiere readings and extended talkbacks with the authors and creative teams. Ask questions of the playwrights, share your opinions of the works in progress, and watch new plays take shape before your eyes.

Information about dates and titles will be posted on the Forward Theater website as it becomes available.

Meet Kenny Barrett, a brooding teenager who has done something that has everyone on high alert. He wishes he could make it through the rest of his senior year unnoticed, but that’s going to be hard since he has to publicly apologize to his entire high school. As his family tries to rebuild their lives, Kenny’s just trying to get through lunch period. A darkly funny and unexpectedly moving story about a family limping out the door in the morning and coming home no matter what.

Juliana Smithton is a brilliant research scientist whose life seems to be coming undone. Her husband has filed for divorce, her daughter has run away with a much older man, and her own health is in jeopardy. But in this brilliantly crafted work, nothing is what it seems. Scene by scene, this mystery unfolds as fact blurs with fiction, past collides with present and the elusive truth about Juliana bubbles to the surface. The result is a potent and haunting drama that explores the fragile boundaries of reality in one woman’s struggle with identity and, ultimately, forgiveness.

in Bucks County, PA, Vanya and his adopted sister Sonia are living out their middle age after years of caring for their ailing, Chekhov-loving parents. It’s a mild and tedious existence. That all changes once their movie-star sister Masha arrives with her twenty-something boy-toy Spike. Soon the siblings are dressing up as fairy-tale characters, channeling Maggie Smith, and dodging the voodoo curses of their soothsaying cleaning woman. Amidst the hilarity, there are moments when this family finds that good old-fashioned human connection might not be obsolete after all.

In Promenade Hall at Overture Center our Monologue Festival is back by popular demand, with an all-new slate of original works performed by some of your favorite FTC actors. This year, we are thrilled to partner with the Dane County Library System to present a monologue festival celebrating our freedom to read.

As always, Forward will invite playwrights from our community and across the country to add their voices to this conversation about free speech – and all that freedom entails.

Needless to say, we’re looking forward to the results: monologues may take the point of view of an author of a banned book, a patron requesting a banned book, a character who’s been “banned,” or even a person challenging a book’s validity.

This is a festival that will ask us to open our minds – and maybe a book or two!