ANGELS IN AMERICA & More Set for Invictus Theatre Company 2025 Season

Invictus Theatre Company has unveiled programming for its 2025 season, its second in residence at the Windy City Playhouse. As in previous seasons, the company will present a mix of Shakespeare and landmark contemporary American dramas, all with insights that are applicable to the present. Additionally, the plays comprising the 2025 season will, to varying degrees, incorporate magical realism into their storytelling, making the point that supernatural forces are sometimes needed to help us understand our current reality. As Hamlet said, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
 
The season will open with Shakespeare's THE WINTER'S TALE, directed by Artistic Director Charles Askenaizer. One of the Bard's later plays, it has been termed by some critics as a comedy and, by others, a romance. A king suspects his wife of infidelity with his Best Friend and tears his family apart for revenge. With the help of some magic, his suspicions are eventually proven to be groundless and the family is put back together. The first three acts of this story of jealousy are filled with intense psychological drama, while the last two acts are comical and supply a happy ending. THE WINTER'S TALE will open to the press on Monday, March 17 at 7 p.m., following previews from March 11, and will play through April 20.
 
In June, Askenaizer will direct Tony Kushner's monumental ANGELS IN AMERICA, with a single cast performing both parts of the play in repertory. Both parts – PART ONE: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES and PART TWO: PERESTROIKA – will open on Saturday, June 28, following previews from June 13 (MILLENNIUM APPROACHES) and June 14  (PERESTROIKA).  The performance schedule (detailed below) will allow audiences the option to see the two parts in sequence on the same day, or on successive days. The final performance of MILLENNIUM APPROACHES will be on Saturday, September 6 at 12 p.m. and the final performance of PERESTROIKA will be Sunday, September 7 at 12 p.m.
 
ANGELS IN AMERICA skillfully weaves realistic scenes with fantasy and magical realism to examine the social, sexual, and religious issues facing the country as the AIDS crisis gains momentum in the 1980s. Some of the characters are fictional, others are historical figures (Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg), some are ghosts, and some are angels. PART ONE: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES and PART TWO: PERESTROIKA each won, in different years, the Tony Award for Best Play. Additionally, MILLENNIUM APPROACHES won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
 
The season will close with THE HOUSE THAT WILL NOT STAND, by Marcus Gardley, a former playwright-in-residence at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, directed by Aaron Reese Boseman. Boseman has previously directed Invictus's productions of TOPDPOG/UNDERDOG (2024), THE MOUNTAINTOP (2023), and A RAISIN IN THE SUN (2020). Gardley's drama, inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca's THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA, is set in 1813 New Orleans, as the French-owned Louisiana Territory is about to be acquired by the United States, threatening the liberty of the free people of color residing on the land. A young woman skilled in the art of voodoo and the appearance of a ghost play into this story set during a very real, but little-known and disturbing chapter of United States history. The press opening will be Monday, November 3 at 7 p.m., following previews from October 28, and playing to December 14.
 

Askenaizer says, "The plays this season look at faith and hope. There is an element of magic in them, of wonder, that primes us for the fantastic revelation of a better tomorrow. The better tomorrow comes, or is promised in all of these plays, but not without considerable struggle beforehand. 
 
“In THE WINTER'S TALE, Leontes waits 16 years before finding his redemption and regeneration given at the hand of the one he most wronged. ANGELS IN AMERICA follows Prior Walter as he confronts angels in a battle for both physical survival and spiritual salvation amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. In THE HOUSE THAT WILL NOT STAND the family of Beartrice Albans seeks freedom and their own path outside of the matriarch's tight fist while America's painful history of slavery looms.
 
“Though the characters in these plays must endure immense trials, the promise of regeneration and renewal—often through mystical, almost miraculous means—guides them toward brighter days ahead. These plays remind us that, though the path may be long and fraught with difficulty; progress, redemption, and salvation await.”

Invictus Theatre Company has been one of the most notable success stories among Chicago's storefront theatres in spite of the challenges facing the theater community in recent years. Founded in 2017, they were an itinerant company until the fall of 2021, when they established residency in the former Jackalope Frontier Theatre in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood, renaming it the Reginald Vaughn Theatre in honor of a deceased founding member. In that space, they continued to build a reputation for intimate and honest interpretations of classics with fidelity to the original texts and close attention to character development. The company's extraordinarily successful 2021-22 season netted the company five Jeff Awards for its 13 nominations. When a fire gutted the Thorndale Avenue building housing the Reginald Vaughn Theatre in July 2023, the company was again homeless until early 2024, when they took up residence in the Windy City Playhouse on Irving Park Road. The company's inaugural season in that space included highly-regarded productions of TOPDOG/UNDERDOG, Chekhov's THREE SISTERS, the Chicago premiere of NETWORK, and Shakespeare's THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH, all of which were Jeff recommended.

 

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