2008-2009 Season
Please join us for the many great performances offered by
the Towson University Department of Theatre Arts this year.

BOX OFFICE

THE CRUCIBLE
Arthur Miller
Directed by Steven Satta
Mainstage Theatre
October 21-Nov 1

Winner of the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. This exciting drama about the Puritan purge of witchcraft in old Salem is both a gripping historical play and a timely parable of our contemporary society. "A powerful drama."

—NY Times. "Strongly written." —NY Daily News.

The story focuses upon a young farmer, his wife, and a young servant-girl who maliciously causes the wife's arrest for witchcraft. The farmer brings the girl to court to admit the lie—and it is here that the monstrous course of bigotry and deceit is terrifyingly depicted. The farmer, instead of saving his wife, finds himself also accused of witchcraft and ultimately condemned with a host of others.

THE PIANO LESSON
by August Wilson
Directed by Peter Wray
Studio Theatre
Dec 5th -13th

August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet.

At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.

MISS JULIE
by August Strindberg
Directed by Naoko Maeshiba
March 5-12
Studio Theatre

Miss Julie (1888) remains Strindberg's most famous work. In the history of drama, it is primarily canonized for its stylistic innovations. Its preface serves as a classic manifesto of late-nineteenth century naturalism. In defining the new naturalist theater, Strindberg makes two major demands of contemporary playwrights. First, he demands that they adhere to an unflinching realism, whether in content (for example the explicit references to menstruation, blasphemy, lust, and bodily functions in Miss Julie); staging (the elimination of footlights and makeup); and time (Miss Julie, for example, takes place over a single, compressed, and unbroken ninety-minute episode).

THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE
by William Saroyan
Directed By Peggy Penniman

May1-9
Mainstage

Money’s tight. Jobs are scarce. But if you faint from hunger, Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon, Restaurant and Entertainment Palace is a good place to do it. Set along the docks of 1939 San Francisco, William Saroyan’s ensemble piece, The Time of Your Life, brings together people who long to hope, people who grind hope to dust and people who hope against all the odds. A street-walker, a troubled cop, an aspiring hoofer, a lovelorn young man, a pinball addict and a slumming society couple are among those who are accepted, and changed, at Nick’s.

The Time of Your Life won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award in the first time the two groups honored the same play.