World Premiere and More Set for 2025-26 Theater Up Close Season

The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County has revealed the lineup for the 2025-26 season of its Theater Up Close series, created in collaboration with local theater companies Zoetic Stage and City Theatre. This season of Theater Up Close returns to the intimate Carnival Studio Theater and features five new-to-Miami productions that each reflect a small part of our diverse community. The lineup for the 2025-26 Theater Up Close series is as follows:
 
Zoetic Stage and Adrienne Arsht Center present

THE MOTHER – FLORIDA PREMIERE

By Florian Zeller
Translation by Christopher Hampton
Directed by Stuart Meltzer
November 6-23, 2025
 
Anne’s adult children are off living their own lives and her husband is busy with his career. So where does that leave Anne, who has built her identity around creating a family and being a good mother? On the night before her husband is set to leave on a business trip, her son comes home to sleep in his old room. Or does he? It’s impossible to know for certain in this riveting play about a woman whose inner life is constantly shifting.
 
Zoetic Stage and Adrienne Arsht Center present

THE INHERITANCE, PART 1 - FLORIDA PREMIERE

By Matthew Lopez
Directed by Stuart Meltzer
January 8-26, 2026
  
Hailed as the most honored American play in a generation, The Inheritance Part 1 won ‘Best Play’ awards in both London and New York including the Tony Award, Olivier Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Drama League Award, and more. The play reimagines E. M. Forster's Howards End as "a wry portrait of New York’s gay community", with gay men from different generations standing in for Forster’s straight people from different classes.
 
City Theatre and Adrienne Arsht Center present

HOW TO BREAK IN A GLOVE – WORLD PREMIERE

By Chris Anthony Ferrer
Directed by Margaret M. Ledford
February 5-22, 2026
 
Set in 1999 Miami, the play follows an 11-year-old boy clinging to the fractured pieces of his Cuban American family: an iron-willed grandfather, a devoted but weary grandmother, a father fighting for relevance, and a mother torn between rebellion and responsibility. When a single night of crisis rips open buried tensions, love and survival collide in a battle for connection, legacy, and the desperate need to belong. Like a well-worn baseball glove, they must break in their bonds—stretching, softening, and learning to hold on before it’s too late.
 
This is the first full-length world premiere to emerge from City Theatre’s Homegrown playwright development program. Shaped through workshops, readings, and mentorship as part of Homegrown, this new play is a testament to the power of investing in local voices and amplifying the stories that define Miami.
 
Zoetic Stage and Adrienne Arsht Center present

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG – MIAMI PREMIERE

By Stephen Sondheim and George Furth
Directed by Stuart Meltzer
March 12-April 5, 2026
  
Zoetic Stage returns to its tradition of mounting Sondheim productions with this Tony Award-winning musical. The story of Frank Shepard, a famous songwriter and eventual film producer, and his two closest friends. Moving backwards across 20 years, the show details Frank's rise from a penniless dreamy-eyed composer to a wealthy film-producing sell-out, and what he lost to get there.
 
Zoetic Stage and Adrienne Arsht Center present

MOSES- FLORIDA PREMIERE

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