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Tickets on sale now for all workshops and our special event presentation of Theater Idiot.

Reading reservations open June 11 … more soon.

Visit our website for more info and ticket links at vassar.edu/powerhouse 💓

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

Training Company:

Fuenteovejuna
Written by Lope de Vega
Adapted and Directed by Shaun Bennet Fauntleroy
July 10-12 at the Preserve

Romeo and Juliet
Written by William Shakespeare
Adapted and Directed by Elizabeth Dahmen
July 17-19 at The Preserve

In This Economy?
Conceived and Composed by Max Reuben
Developed and performed by members of the Training Company
July 2, 9, 16, 23 in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Ashram
Written by Erin C. Buckley
Directed by Aysan Celik
Developed and Performed by Members of the Training Company
July 19-20 in the Susan Stein Shiva Theater

New Works Play Festival
Written and Directed by members of the Training Company
July 25 in the Susan Stein Shiva Theater

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

Punch Back
Written by Genevieve Simon
July 25 in the Powerhouse Theater

Come to class. You know which one. Someone was whispering about it at the bathroom protest. Remember? Your ex might be there. Your crush will definitely be there. We’re gonna box it out. We’re gonna get strong. There is definitely absolutely no other resource we will be…distributing. Is your friend trans? Bring them too. Anew play for trans students on college campuses in red states in 2025.

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

A Simple Herstory
Created by Jocelyn Kuritsky
Written and Developed by Jonathan A. Goldberg
Additional Conception and Co-Direction by Jenny Turner Hall
Producing Consultation by Donya K. Washington
Directed by Meghan Finn
July 24-26 in the Powerhouse Theater

Returning for a rare third residency at Powerhouse, A Simple Herstory is the acclaimed genre-blurring performance project exploring the more than 100 women who have run for President of the United States. This newest installment returns to Margaret Chase Smith and the volatile political climate surrounding mid-20th century Republican Party politics, tracing her evolving political identity amid shifting pressures of ideology, public expectation, and personal conviction. At once incisive and irreverent, searingly serious and sharply comic, A Simple Herstory offers the latest installment of the raucously funny and thought-provoking serialized podcast.

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

Fanboy/Diva
Written by Cheri Steinkellner
Lyrics by David Zippel
Music by Walter Afanasieff, Cy Coleman, Alan Menken, and Matthew Wilder
Directed by Will Roland
July 17-19 in the Powerhouse Theater

A once-iconic Broadway diva, determined to reclaim the role that made her a star, discovers her online identity has been hijacked by a teenage superfan. Forced into a prickly alliance, diva and fan must share the spotlight—until admiration turns to confrontation in this hilarious, heartfelt, new musical about legacy, currency, and the cost of being seen.

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

An Evening of Soundpainting
Featuring Soundpainting Inventor Walter Thompson and Artists from Around the World
In Collaboration with Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble and Soundpainting Thinktank
July 11 in the The Belle Skinner Hall of Music

An Evening of Soundpainting is a dynamic, one-night-only performance featuring Soundpainting creator Walter Thompson alongside an international cohort of musicians, actors, dancers, and visual artists. The event marks the culmination of the Soundpainting Thinktank, a week-long gathering of artists from over a dozen countries engaged in intensive collaboration, performance, and research.

The concert will feature a series of live-composed Soundpaintings. Soundpainting is the universal, multidisciplinary sign language for live composition, used by musicians, actors, dancers, and visual artists. With more than 1,500 gestures, the language allows composers to shape work in real time—nothing is pre-planned, and each piece is created in the moment and will never be repeated.

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

Godfriend
Written and Performed by Hal Cosentino and Ellenor Riley-Condit
Original Music and Sound Design by Hannah Read
Directed by Caley Chase
July 10-12 in the Powerhouse Theater

Equal parts true story, theatrical play, live music, and spiritual gathering, Godfriend asks audiences to practice radical belief in each other while facing uncertain futures.

College professors and real-life couple Hal and Elle ask: should they have a child? As a trans man and a cis woman, the couple wonders if their spiritual callings of gender identity and procreation can coexist. Clues appear in their class discussions about the Public Universal Friend, a nineteenth-century Quaker preacher who claimed God freed them from gender.

A live music score created by Hannah Read (known for her work as Lomelda) transforms the performance into a participatory Quaker meeting, where audiences listen for wisdom from the divine.

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

Ocean Walk
Written by Gianfranco Lentini
Directed by Jonathon Loy
July 2-5 in the Powerhouse Theater

Fire Island is gone. A cataclysmic storm has breached the island’s last defenses, leaving the Pines swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean. All residents have evacuated—except Harry, a seventy-year-old man unwilling to abandon his submerged home. When Casey, a seventeen-year-old deckhand from the Sayville Ferry Service, arrives to pull him out, the two find themselves caught between survival and surrender, history and erasure.

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

The Power of Something Invisible
Written by Pete McElligott
Directed by Judson Jones
June 28 in the Powerhouse Theater

Separated by space and time, united by the same sky, astronomers Caroline Hershel, Maria Mitchell, and Vera Rubin dared to see beyond their known world. As these women stood on each other’s shoulders aiming for clarity and truth against all odds, their brilliance pierced the darkness, reshaping how we understand the stars...and our place among them.

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

Marielitos
Book and Lyrics by Peter Gil-Sheridan and Cristina Luzárraga
Music by Julián Mesri
Directed by Rebecca Aparicio
June 27 in the Powerhouse Theater

In 1980, thousands of Cuban refugees arrived in the U.S. via the Mariel Boatlift. “Marielitos” were a motley crew of political dissidents, artists, prisoners, “mental patients,” and homosexuals; all eager to escape Castro’s regime. Told through the rhythms of the Caribbean and the Midwest, Marieliotos centers around the linguist René Valdes’ quest for belonging, as well as his struggles as a partner and father. This tragicomic musical, both epic and intimate in scope, traces the incredible story of one immigrant’s fight to bridge cultural divides and find his place in the world.

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

pits
Written by Abe Johnson
Directed by Ryan Dobrin
June 26 in the Powerhouse Theater

Set inside an underfunded American public middle school, two eighth-grade boys spiral down dark internet rabbit holes while their first-year teacher struggles to keep up with a mandated “social-emotional learning” curriculum and a generation of kids raised by algorithms. As online exposure intensifies and institutional and parental supports fail, the play opens up questions around our children’s unrestricted access to the internet, desensitization, neglect, masculinity, and what it actually means to educate “the whole child.”

Announcing the 40th season of Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.

Rita Hayworth and the Orson Welles Variations
Written by Isaac Byrne
Directed by Jessi D. Hill
June 20 in the Powerhouse Theater

Rita, unaware that she is in late-stage Alzheimer’s, is trapped in a never-ending cycle of jumbled memories: bull fights, talk shows, controlling producers, the ghosts of her past, and a tumultuous romance with Orson, the person she is trying to hold onto. As she tries to rewrite the past, Rita is forced to confront the difference between a tragedy and a happy ending.