Shows Category: 2013-14

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.