Play Productions
Everybody's Favorite Mothers
NNPN Rolling World Premier 2026
Everybody's Favorite Mothers is a theatrical celebration of unconditional love and unlikely activism that started in the summer of 1972 when one mother marched in a parade with her gay son. She carried a home-made sign boldly declaring her support — and a new kind of movement was born. On that day she was an unknown hero to dozens of shocked gays and lesbians — but the story didn’t end there. Jeanne Manford and her husband Jules went on to co-found a support group for parents — an organization that would eventually become known around the world as PFLAG which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023.
Miranda
A psychological riddle set in the world’s most explosive region, Miranda is a play about the dedicated women and men who work in the Middle East to secure intelligence and the local citizens who may or may not be willing or able to help them. Miranda is the mind-bending, existential crisis of a CIA operative who goes by many names. Who is she? What keeps her working in the Middle East after all these years? Why can’t she leave? Whose war is she fighting? Who are her friends and who is the enemy? Who can she trust and who’s playing whom? What happened to her in Jordan?
Appoggiatura
Appoggiatura is a musical term that resembles a grace note. It translates literally as “to lean” or “to support.” And so it is with three closely related Americans who find themselves lost in Venice, Italy, and spend a day wandering through that City of Dreams.
The House That Jack Built
A family Thanksgiving in Vermont is the setting for a clash of old traditions and new love; empty chairs and the people who threaten to fill them; and a family who prizes open arms, the sweet pursuit of happiness and the mysterious heartbreak that comes with getting what you think you want.
The Heavens are Hung in Black
Highlighting the five months between the death of Lincoln’s son Willie and the delivery of the Emancipation Proclamation, Heavens will offer audiences a glimpse into the person who was Abraham Lincoln.
Faced with unbearable personal, political and historical pressures, Lincoln copes with the world around him and eventually, through an amazing transformation of thinking, conquers it.
I Love To Eat
Before Julia Child and long before today’s proliferation of cooking shows, there was James Beard, the first TV chef. He brought a love for fine cooking (and a sense of humor) to the small screen in 1946 and helped establish an American cuisine based on fresh ingredients. Famous for quips like, “If ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around,” Beard went on to become America’s first “foodie,” and the award bearing his name is still the prize most coveted by chefs across the country. Larger than life (literally and metaphorically), American culinary icon James Beard was a complex, entertaining, beloved and frustrating friend and mentor to many.
Iron Kisses
A story of a family: a son who made up for being gay by being perfect; a daughter who treats her daughter the way her mother treated her; a mother who struggles to love her two children equally; and a father who started missing his son while he was still a little boy. In a revealing theatrical twist, two actors portray the siblings as well as their Midwestern mother and father as the complex nature of love, family and marriage in the 21st century is explored.
Looking Over the President's Shoulder
When Alonzo Fields accepted a job as a butler at the White House in 1931, his plan was to work there for the winter. That winter lasted 21 years. Based on the real-life story of the grandson of a freed slave who grew up in an all-black town in southern Indiana, Fields is forced by the Depression to give up his dreams of becoming an opera singer and accept the job at the White House where he quickly was appointed Chief Butler. Looking Over the President's Shoulder is told from the unique perspective of the Chief Butler who served four U.S. presidents and their families.
And Then They Came for Me
And Then They Came for Me is a unique theatrical experience: a multimedia play that weaves videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors Ed Silverberg and Eva Schloss with live actors recreating scenes from their lives during World War II. Ed was Anne Frank's first boyfriend and she wrote about him in the beginning of her now-famous diary. Mr. Silverberg barely escaped the Nazis before going into hiding in Belgium for 26 months. Eva Schloss was the same age as Anne Frank and lived in the same apartment building in Amsterdam. Her family went into hiding the same day as the Frank family. And like the Frank family, they were also betrayed. On Eva's 15th birthday, her family was arrested by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps. Eva and her mother survived and after the war her mother married Otto Frank (Anne's father).
BLACK BEAUTY: an autobiography of a horse
Inspired by Anna Sewell's novel subtitled "The Autobiography of a Horse". A story of resilience and justice that spans the life of a horse named Black Beauty.
April 4, 1968: Before We Forget How to Dream
An intimate look at one Indianapolis family and their personal experience surrounding the events of April 4, 1968, which include Bobby Kennedy’s history-making speech on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. This play is inspired by true stories gathered through four years of community conversations.
Amber Waves
Winner of AATE's Distinguished Play Award and originally produced at The Kennedy Center, Amber Waves focuses children in a family struggling to hold on to their farm and each other.
The Widow Lincoln
Ridiculed and disdained for her perceived sense of entitlement, Mary Lincoln sparked more controversy than any First Lady before or since.
Set during the weeks following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre, The Widow Lincoln portrays a very human Mary in the aftermath of her husband’s death as she mourns the post-war life they will never share.
Ford’s Theatre commissioned this world premiere as part of Ford’s 150, a series of events marking the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination.
A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters
A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters passionately and compassionately wrestles with the question: "How does faith both unite and divide us?" and explores the often invisibility of faith, how we make unconscious assumptions about one other based on religion, and how often those assumptions are wrong. Inspired by oral histories, community events, and the circular structure of Schnitzler's play La Ronde, the play's 10 scenes include a Native American woman who teaches ESL to a class of immigrant senior citizens; two astronauts in crisis far away from home and searching for common ground; a man who meets the woman who received his mother's transplanted heart; and a journalist who interviews a family whose son has been killed in Iraq.
The Velvet Rut
Mr. Smith is a high school English teacher who loves his students, his wife and his poetry. When a single event unravels his world and sends him free-falling into a crisis of faith, a mysterious Boy Scout arrives to take him on a mind-blowing and soul-searching trek through the wilderness.
Searching For Eden
As one critic wrote about Searching for Eden: "In the beginning—and throughout the play—there was laughter. And the audience found it good." More than a hundred years after Mark Twain wrote his own short stories about Adam and Eve, James Still combines those stories for Act One of Searching for Eden, and then imagines Adam and Eve in the present day for Act Two to create this completely original and contemporary play about the world's first love story. Act One takes place at the dawn of time in the Garden of Eden. In the imaginations of Still and Twain, the Garden of Eden is a place where the battle of the sexes begins, where language is deliciously invented, and where loneliness and heartbreak are poignantly discovered.
The Little Choo-Choo That Thinks She Can
Once the train is all loaded up with passengers, Devan begins the trip up the big, big hill. However, the hill is just too big for her to make it over. She tries to enlist the assistance of various other engines but they all can’t, or won’t, help her out.
She keeps trying, and each attempt gets her a little farther up the big, big hill — but quite not over it. We, her friends in the audience, offer encouragement to assist her in believing she has the ability to actually make it up the big, big hill by herself.
Will she make it? Will her special delivery get through to her friends? What sound does a giraffe make? These questions and others will be answered in terms that preschoolers, special-needs kids, and even the grown-ups who brought them will understand..