2024-2025 Season Announcement

Purdue Theatre announces the 2024-2025 Season

Purdue University's Department of Theatre and Dance is excited to announce the 2024-2025 Theatre mainstage season. This season brings exciting explorations of life and death, and love and loss for long-time Purdue Theatre fans and newcomers alike, with productions by award-winning contemporary playwrights, a classic from the Bard himself, and an original production created by our own faculty, staff, and students that is sure to challenge audience expectations of a "play"!

We embrace the intimacy of a small stage this year as we feature both the opening and closing productions of the season, Dead Man's Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl, in September, and Gloria, by Brandon Jacob-Jenkins, in April, in the Carole and Gordon Mallett Theatre. These two explorations of contemporary life—both comedic and tragic, banal and sublime—provide compelling and thought-provoking bookends to our season. One explores how we remember those whose lives have ended; the other examines how we respond when our own end looms unexpectedly and dangerously before us.

This November, join us in exploring the world of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as we debut our own adaptation of the classic science fiction novel. Attendees, guided by Mary Shelley herself, experience this walk-through event—a combination play, haunted house, ghost walk—throughout multiple locations in Pao Hall, including both the Carole & Gordon Mallett Theatre, the Nancy T. Hansen Theatre, and support spaces like our scenery construction lab and scenic painting lab.

Finally, in February, we present William Shakespeare's classic A Midsummer Night's Dream. Follow the story of two eloping pairs of lovers from Athens, the bickering fairy deities Oberon and Titania, and the bumbling but earnest rustic performers as they prepare to perform the tragedy, "Pyramus and Thisbe" for the Duke's upcoming wedding.

"I am so excited about these productions! I think we have found a great balance of new and classic works, and Mary Shelley Presents: Frankenstein will hopefully be the start of a whole new exploration of non-traditional styles and approaches to presenting live storytelling to audiences."

-Rich Dionne, Chair, Department of Theatre and Dance

Each of these productions provides opportunities for as many as one hundred students—actors, designers, technicians, stage managers, majors, minors, and non-majors alike—to practice the skills they learn in their classes in a real-world setting that could never be replicated in a classroom.

Dead Man's Cell Phone

by Sarah Ruhl
directed by Tom Robson
September 20-29, 2024
Carole & Gordon Mallett Theatre

Mary Shelley Presents: Frankenstein

story by Quetta Carpenter
directed by Claire Mason
November 8-17, 2024
Yue-Kong Pao Hall

A Midsummer Night's Dream

by William Shakespeare
directed by Anne Damman
February 21- March 2, 2025
Nancy T. Hansen Theatre

Gloria

by Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins
April 11-20, 2025
Carole & Gordon Mallett Theatre

For questions or for suggestions about how to connect to classes or to find out about group discounts, please contact:
Email: theatre@purdue.edu
Phone: 765-494-3074

Tickets for individual shows as well as season passes to all productions are available at all three campus box office locations, and online through the Purdue Box Office. To find more information on each show, check out our brochure.