Small casts and grand ambitions will share the stage for Theatre Lab’s newly announced 2025-2026 season. The resident professional theatre company at Florida Atlantic University returns for its 11th year with three world-premiere plays that reckon with the past—from ancient historical connections to personal traumas—along with a new-play festival and a colorful musical in conjunction with FAU’s Department of Theatre & Dance.
Theatre Lab’s three-show main-stage season opens with “The City in the City in the City” (Nov. 8-23). So nice he named it thrice, playwright Matthew Capodicasa’s drama abounds in mystery, theatricality and invention—qualities that suffuse many a Theatre Lab production. It follows the journey of two strangers linked by mortality and fate: Tess had planned a trip with her mother to an ancient city-state to retrieve a package left for them by Tess’s estranged father. When Mom dies, Tess creates a Craigslist ad seeking a person of her mother’s exact name to join her on the odyssey, which takes both women to a borderless land where monastic cheese, octogenarian crooners and ancient graves only begin to unveil a expansive world of myth and wonder in which two actors—Vaishnavi Sharma and Niki Fridh—will portray more than 30 eclectic roles.
Theatre Lab opens 2026 with back-to-back productions from playwright Joanna Castle Miller—the first two entries in a planned trilogy. The narrative ripples of “CONVERSA” (Feb. 7-22) stretch back to the Inquisition, as the play’s title refers to Jews who converted to Christianity to avoid being exiled from their homeland. Its echoes are felt in this autobiographically grounded one-woman show. “CONVERSA” follows Joanna, whose mother, despite her rabbinical aspirations, converted to evangelicalism through Jews for Jesus. Joanna followed her mother into the Christian faith, even serving as a missionary. We witness the upending of her worldview when she visits a tiny Jewish village where her great-grandfather once confronted a similar dilemma regarding his faith.
“CONVERSA” will be followed by the second in Castle Miller’s trilogy, “INFERNA” (April 11-26), another intimate play whose themes and characters hit close to home. It’s set on a mostly empty theater stage, where Castle Miller plays a young playwright who, with the help of a male actor, plumbs the childhood experiences that shaped her faith and career, from church activities to school plays. Castle Miller and her scene partner embark on a series of comedic reenactments, stories from their past and musical performances that shed new light on the various scripts that Castle Miller’s character was expected to follow, ultimately discovering sobering insights that the mentors of her youth were not the role models she believed them to be.
April promises to be a busy time for Theatre Lab, whose 2026 “Owl” New Play Festival, featuring readings of new works, runs from April 11-26. And from April 17-26, the company will collaborate with FAU’s Department of Theatre & Dance on “By Any Other Name,” a new musical from the prolific Deborah Zoe Laufer (whose play “The Last Yiddish Speaker” was a chilling highlight of Theatre Lab’s previous season) and composer/lyricist Daniel Green. “By Any Other Name” is a mash-up of mostly doomed Shakespearean heroines who find themselves in the same cauldron stirred by the Three Witches of Macbeth.
Tickets for Theatre Lab’s three-show main-stage season run $120. Call 561/297-6124 or visit fauevents.com.
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