Department alumni can reserve two complimentary tickets to any of our mainstages! Please contact our Box office to arrange your tickets: theatretix@vcu.edu / 804.828.6026
We would love for you to see what our current students and faculty are working on!
Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde
By Moisés Kaufman
Directed by Freddie Ashley
December 1st – 4th, 2022
Showtimes:
TH 12/1 – 7:30pm
FRI 12/2 – 7:30pm
SAT 12/3- 2:00pm & 7:30pm
SUN 12/4 – 3:00pm
VCUarts Theatre presents Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moisés Kaufman, a thrilling courtroom drama based on the true events surrounding the downfall of celebrated poet and playwright Oscar Wilde in Victorian England. Gross Indecency uses trial transcripts, personal correspondence, interviews and other source materials to tell the story of the 1895 trials that resulted in Wilde being arrested and imprisoned for the crime of sodomy. In April 1895, Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his youthful lover, who had publicly maligned Wilde as a sodomite. In starting the libel suit, Wilde set in motion the series of events that would culminate in his own ruin and imprisonment. Within a year the bewildered Wilde himself was on trial for acts of gross indecency and, implicitly—for a vision of art and morality that outraged Victorian propriety. Expertly interweaving courtroom testimony with excerpts from Wilde’s writings and the words of his contemporaries, Gross Indecency unveils its subject in all his genius and human frailty, his age in all its complacency and repression.
Improv!
Directed by Elizabeth Byland, Hassan Fields, David Koenigsberg (BA ’20), & Marisa Rigot (BA ’21)
Monday December 5th
A night of laughs with all our VCU Improv teams!
School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play
By Jocelyn Bioh
Directed by Katrinah Carol Lewis (BFA ’03)
February 23rd – 26th, 2023
School Girls is a funny, biting commentary on beauty pageants, as seen through the eyes of young Ghanaian hopefuls attending a boarding school in 1986. Paulina, the reigning queen bee at the Aburi Girls’ school has a squad of minions and is the top choice for the Miss Ghana Beauty Pageant…until a new beautiful and poised transfer student enters the scene. Plans are foiled, secrets are spilled and feelings are hurt as the girls try to navigate this tricky thing known as adolescence and deal with colorism, classism, and bullying.
Rent
Book, Music, and Lyrics by Jonathan Larson
Directed by Desiree Dabney
Choreographed by Wes Seals (MFA ’18)
April 21st – 30th, 2023
Set in the East Village of New York City, Rentis about falling in love, finding your voice and living for today. Winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Rent has become a pop cultural phenomenon with songs that rock and a story that resonates with audiences of all ages.
Based loosely on Puccini’s La Boheme, Jonathan Larson’s Rent follows a year in the life of a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York’s Lower East Side, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.
How these young bohemians negotiate their dreams, loves and conflicts provides the narrative thread to this groundbreaking musical.
Compiled by Sarah Moore (Department Marketing and PR Coordinator) for the November 2022 Theatre Alumni Newsletter