Shakespeare’s most beloved fairy story will unfold under stars this coming summer, when “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” returns to American Players Theatre.
Last seen at the Spring Green classical repertory company in 2017 to coincide with the launch of APT’s renovated Hill Theatre, “Midsummer” will be led by David Daniel, a longtime core acting company member.
“I’ll never get tired of ‘Midsummer,’” said APT artistic director Brenda DeVita. “It is essentially what the audience does when they come to the woods. They come to get lost and find themselves, and that’s exactly what happens in ‘Midsummer.’”
On Thursday, American Players Theatre announced its 46th season, running June 7-Oct. 5, 2025. Five plays will open in the early part of the summer. Another three start their repertory runs in August.
The slate in the Hill Theatre, a 1,075-seat amphitheater on a rural hill, will include the comic return of Noël Coward (“Fallen Angels”), William Inge’s prescient 1950s drama “Picnic,” Nilo Cruz’s steamy 2003 “Anna in the Tropics,” and a Shakespearean “problem” play, “The Winter’s Tale.”
Though some casting decisions are still being made, Phoebe González, left, is set to perform in “Anna in the Tropics” and Laura Rook, right, will be one of four actors in “39 Steps” at American Players Theatre in 2025. (They are shown here in 2024’s “Ring Round the Moon”).
Three plays in APT’s indoor, 200-seat Touchstone Theatre will open with a world premiere of a play by Gavin Lawrence. (Lawrence currently stars in “Nat Turner in Jerusalem” with Jim DeVita, up through Nov. 10). APT staged a reading of Lawrence’s play, now called “The Death of Chuck Brown,” in 2023, and has developed it since.
A trio of comic actors — not yet officially confirmed — will revive Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” about a friendship challenged by a very expensive white canvas. “Tribes,” a 2010 play by English playwright Nina Raine, opens in August. It is set to feature 2023’s Romeo, Josh Castille.
A pair of Pucks, not-so-merry wives
Artistic director DeVita has led APT since 2014. Though the company has quite a lot of casting yet to do, one pair of actors has already started workshopping ideas for “Midsummer.”
“It will be a dual-language Puck,” DeVita said, in reference to the mischievous fairy character. Castille, who is deaf, uses American Sign Language and speaks English. Casey Hoekstra, a hearing actor, knows ASL.
“They created this kind of woven Puck,” DeVita added. “Puck has to be magical, the play has to be magical, and the rules for the fairyland are what you make them. … We had a little showing at the end of their workshop, and they did a bunch of pieces of Puck. It was so good, so inspiring.”
Isabelle Bushue and Josh Castille played Juliet and Romeo in 2023 at American Players Theatre.
Castille will also star in “Tribes,” a play about a young man who was born deaf into a hearing family. When he starts dating Sylvia, a woman from a deaf family who’s slowly losing her own hearing, he begins to understand how much he has never been heard.
“There are not very many plays specifically written for a deaf actor, so you get asked to do it a lot,” DeVita said. Castille is game, she said, because he “really believes in the play as an introduction to people, thinking about what it is to be deaf and what it takes to be a part of a family.
“It’s brutally funny, but also really moving.”
APT tends to save a slot in each season for a midcentury farce or a period comedy of manners, plays like “Born Yesterday,” “The Liar” and “The Rivals.” Coward’s wit last bubbled on the Hill in 2015 with “Private Lives” starring Deborah Staples. Next season will be the first time a woman, namely actor/director Shannon Cochran, will lead a Coward piece.
John Taylor Phillips and Deborah Staples performed in 2015’s “Private Lives” by Noël Coward at American Players Theatre.
Cochran directed “Fallen Angels” at Remy Bumppo Theatre Company in Chicago, and DeVita caught it there. The comedy, which premiered in 1925, follows two society wives awaiting the arrival of a man with whom both had an affair years earlier.
“Coward is a very specific style of theater,” DeVita said. “It’s funny on a knife’s edge. And it’s not funny if it’s a butter knife. How to play on that edge is learned. … Why do we enjoy laughing at these people? The humor lands because they are so completely unaware of how ridiculous they are, while thinking they’re not ridiculous at all.”
A summer ‘Picnic’
DeVita herself will lead Inge’s “Picnic,” about the ripple among women in Independence, Kansas, when handsome Hal comes to town. There’s heavy flirting, underage drinking and (offstage) premarital sex, as well as lots of existential angst.
In a review of a Broadway production in 2017, a New York Times critic wrote that, while not as well known as Tennessee Williams, Inge’s work “burst with generous humanity and possessed a sure grasp on the power of intimacy.”
From left, Erica Cruz Hernández, Eduardo Xavier Curley-Carrillo and Melisa Pereyra performed in “The River Bride” at American Players Theatre in 2022. Director Robert Ramirez will lead “Anna in the Tropics” at APT in 2025.
Robert Ramirez, director of this season’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” will lead the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Anna in the Tropics,” set in a Florida cigar factory in 1929. Though technology encroaches, the Cuban-American workers still roll cigars by hand, a repetitive task eased by a handsome lector reading novels like “Anna Karenina.”
“It’s so romantic,” DeVita said. “This is the first Latine play up the Hill. Melisa (Pereyra) will be in it, Phoebe (Gonzalez) will be in it. … It’s a very personal, relationship-driven play. It’s not surface at all. Everybody lives very deeply.”
Reza’s “Art,” by contrast, begins with a surface: a white canvas with fine white lines, made by a very famous artist, purchased for the equivalent of nearly $58,000 in 2024 dollars. A friendship among three adult men threatens to fracture because of this purchase, and what it says about each of them.
“Our audience is smart,” DeVita said. “They like a smart play, about ‘What is art?’ What is worthy of our time and money and resources and consideration?”
Shana Cooper adapted “The Taming of the Shrew” at APT in 2021. The play featured, from left, Daniel José Molina, Casey Hoekstra, Colleen Madden, Alejandra Escalante and James Ridge.
Shana Cooper, who led APT’s transformative production of “Taming of the Shrew” in 2021, returns to take on the problems of “The Winter’s Tale,” which turns a story of a husband’s horrible jealousy into an unlikely comedy.
Lawrence’s play, “The Death of Chuck Brown,” was inspired in part by the ripple effects from that event in 2012, when the “godfather of go-go” died in Baltimore. Lawrence set his play in a barbershop, with characters who are from a place they sense is disappearing under their feet.
“Gavin has written a play about his son and about his forefathers, and he’s put them all in one place, the town he grew up in,” DeVita said.
The shoulder season of 2025 — a full year from now — is planned to be a production of “The 39 Steps,” a farce in which four actors play dozens of characters. Inspired by an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, it involves secret agents and high-stakes hijinks on trains and planes and automobiles.
The full 2025 schedule will be available in January, and tickets will go on sale to returning patrons in March.
