Cibber-Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Husband, a comedy about an extravagant wife, was a huge success in Newport. And Nicholas Rowe’s brooding The Tragedy of Jane Shore, inspired by the life of the mistress of Edward IV, drew standing-room only crowds.
That was in the late-1760s, when these plays were among the first theatrical stagings in RI despite anti-theater laws fueled by pervasive Quaker and Puritan ideologies and British rule. “The colony of Newport,” wrote the Journal of the Newport Historical Society, “had been settled in a spirit of religious and social liberty… and was seen as the only potential New England location in which a theater might thrive.”
Shortly thereafter and against similar pushback, August von Kotzebue’s hit comedy about two estranged twin brothers, titled The Reconciliation; or, Birth-day, was slaying them in the aisles of the Providence Theater on the corner of Westminster and Mathewson streets, where Grace Church now stands.
We live once again in an era of government interference in the performing arts, most notably the Trump administration’s takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts this past February. And local theaters are feeling the sting of federal funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and of attempts to impose anti-diversity, -equity, and -inclusion restrictions on much-needed grants.
Living up to their legacy, Providence-area professional theaters have shown resilience – and, occasionally, defiance – by continuing to offer thought-provoking stories through engaging stagecraft in the face of adversity and budget cuts. Here are five favorite works from the 2025 season.
Girls & Boys at Gamm Theatre
Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys is a spellbinding memory play requiring one actor, psychopathy as drama, and audience buy-in. It is structured as an uninterrupted, 115-minute monologue performed in a series of confessional chats that our unnamed protagonist shares in direct-address.
Interspersed between chats are dramatic, unromanticized scenes in which she interacts with figments of others from her memory, including her husband during various phases of their relationship, and her two young children during different stages of their development. Collectively, they reveal one woman’s rude awakenings about marriage, motherhood, and toxic masculinity.
The creatives at the Gamm Theatre, particularly director Rachel Walshe, did an exceptional job attracting our attention and facilitating our engagement by keeping things simple. Jessica Hill Kidd’s scenic design consisted of a 12-by-12-foot platform that appeared, thanks to the surrounding pitch darkness, to be suspended a few feet above the floor and just a few feet away from the first row of seating. Lighting designer James Horban used different tones to differentiate between the chats and the scenes, and dramatically transition from one reality to the other.
All this created an enthralling theatrical intimacy that allowed all eyes to focus on actor Donnla Hughes at the center of the platform, whose performance Motif called “veracious and flawless.”
Cold War Choir Practice at Trinity Rep
Local playwright Ro Reddick poked contemporary terrors by cleverly revisiting those of Ronald Reagan’s America in her dark, deliciously funny, off-kilter Cold War Choir Practice. Not since Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove has the threat of nuclear holocaust been so brilliantly and bizarrely satirized.
But rather than placing the fate of the world in the hands of a hapless Royal Air Force officer on an exchange program during the height of the Cold War (played in the film by Peter Sellers), Reddick handed the task to an inquisitive 10-year-old girl (a pigtailed and enchanting Lucia Aremu, who was an MFA student at Brown/Trinity) from the largely Black Southside neighborhood of Syracuse, New York. She managed to turn global politics into a family affair, featuring some of Providence’s best actors (Mathieu Myrick, Jackie Davis, Taavon Gamble, and Rebecca Gibel).
The humor, of which there was plenty, was delivered with impeccable timing, impressive physicality, and through inventive storytelling that included sardonic songs sung by a children’s choir played by adults (Alison Russo, Anna Slate, Hannah Spacone, and Bethany Aiken), shadow puppetry (designed by Drew Dir and Sarah Fornace), and a remarkable battle royale (choreographed by Mark Rose). This high risk/high reward staging of a world premiere work, under Aileen Wen McGroddy’s direction, was a reminder of why Trinity Rep received the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater Company.
American Idiot at Wilbury Theatre
Upon the underground band’s major-label debut in 1994, Rolling Stone noted that Green Day was comprised of “snotty little Berkeley, California, punk kids… three cheeky monkeys who came to raid the bar and disappear.” Raid they did, with music that channeled the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, but disappear they did not. In 2004, they produced the Grammy Award-winning concept album American Idiot, which was turned into a 90-minute punk-rock opera by Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong and Broadway/Metropolitan Opera veteran Michael Mayer.
The show – brimming with defiance and sarcasm – hit New York City in 2010. On the Wilbury Theatre Co. stage in 2025, the production was a triumphant, headbanging, full-frontal assault. “There’s something electrifying about watching a stage tremble under the weight of pure, unfiltered angst,” wrote Alison O’Donnell for Motif. The songs, supported by a top-tier team of local musicians (Chloe Cordeiro, Ernie Lau, James Lucey, Nick Mendillo, and Christine Perkins) followed the story of Johnny (Michael Eckenreiter), a young anti-hero. He chooses to leave home for the city to find a girl (Jenna Benzinger) and his voice as a musician. What he actually finds are hard drugs and crippling malaise.
Designers Scott Osborne (scenic), Alexander P. Sprague (lighting), Andy Russ (sound and video), and Ali Kenner Brodsy (choreography) made sure that this outrageous production did not resemble the traditional theatrical artform too closely. And director Josh Short and musical director Milly Massey made sure that the aforementioned defiance and sarcasm came through particularly loud and crystal-meth clear.
Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches at Gamm Theatre
“Brilliant, maddening, and necessary.” That’s how The New Yorker’s theater critic Hilton Als described Tony Kushner’s Angels in America after it premiered at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre Company in 1991. It went on to win a Pulitzer for Drama and a Tony for Best Play in 1993, and resulted in award-winning revivals on Broadway and London’s West End before its recent staging by Gamm Theatre.
The play is set in the mid-1980s as AIDS ravages the nation and escalates the pre-existing discrimination aimed at gay men. Thirty-year-old New Yorker Prior Walter (an immediately likable and immensely sympathetic Haas Regen) is one of them. The story revolves around his diagnosis and illness, and explores the lives of those also impacted by AIDS (Ben Steinfeld, Tony Estrella, Jeff Church, Gabrielle McCauley, Rodney Witherspoon II, Phyllis Kay, and Rachael Warren). But it’s Prior’s life that serves as a launching pad for weighty discussions about conservatism, homophobia, and race relations.
What is brilliant about this audaciously ambitious play and director Brian McEleney’s dramatic and effectively pared-down production of it (designed by Patrick Lynch, Jeff Adelberg, and David T. Howard) is that they are at once imaginative and unpretentious, uncompromising and affable, and hard to watch but impossible to look away from.
hang at Burbage Theatre
debbie tucker green has written 13 engrossing plays, each one urgent, angry, and socio-politically pertinent. Each is presented in a rhythmic, idiosyncratic style that embraces silences and employs an abundance of fragmented and elliptical dialogue to relay the inadequacy of language in the face of terrible human suffering.
hang is a mere 80 minutes long and contains one scene, in one room, with only three characters. The play received its RI premiere staging by the Burbage Theatre Co. in partnership with WomensWork Theatre Collaborative. Under Lynne Collinson’s incisive direction and with an outstanding cast, this was a meticulously crafted work.
The story takes place at some indefinite point in the near future, where an unnamed victim (MJ Daly) of an unspecified but devastating crime is meeting with a pair of anonymous, dark-suited bureaucratic agents (Margaret Melozzi and Arron Morris) from an undisclosed department responsible for crime and punishment. She has been brought to a nondescript interrogation room (designed by Trevor Elliott). There, she has been given the responsibility to decide how the person who has forever broken her life and brutally traumatized her family will be killed. About a third of hang’s production time is given over to a minute dissection of bureaucratic failure in the face of grief and anger. Message received.
Bob Abelman is an award-winning theater critic who also writes for The Boston Globe.