Goodman Theatre Unveils 2024/25 Season Updates

Goodman Theatre has revealed 2024/2025 Season updates to the series in the 350-seat flexible Owen Theatre. The final production in the Owen is Jordan Harrison’s newest play, The Antiquities—a shocking and transcendent portrait of the present, from the vantage point of the future. This world-premiere production appears May 3 – June 1, 2025, co-produced with Playwrights Horizons (where Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize finalist Marjorie Prime debuted) and the Vineyard Theater. In addition, casting for the previously announced Primary Trust is set as the Goodman congratulates playwright Eboni Booth on clinching the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play: Namir Smallwood will star as Kenneth in the Goodman’s Chicago-premiere production, October 5 – November 3, 2024, casting by Lauren Port, CSA. The Goodman’s 2024/2025 Season begins September 2024 and continues through August 2025.

Memberships, including flexible packages, are available for purchase starting at $48; call 312.443.3800 or visit GoodmanTheatre.org/Connect. Single tickets go on sale for select productions beginning in July.

The world-premiere of Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities jumps across time, taking human society to, and beyond, its conclusion. At the Museum of Late Human Antiquities, the curators are fiercely committed to bringing a lost civilization to life again: What were humans really like? What did they wear, what did they eat, how did they die out? By casting us into the far future, Harrison’s new play gives us an uncanny view of the present moment, as we straddle the analog world that was and the post-human world to come. 

In addition to Marjorie Prime, Jordan Harrison’s credits include Log Cabin, Amazons and Their Men and The Amateurs, among others. His TV work includes three seasons of the Netflix hit, Orange is the New Black. In Marjorie Prime’s 2015 production at Playwrights Horizons, Harrison’s ​​”elegant, thoughtful and quietly unsettling drama” was hailed as “a rumination on technology that fits right into the current spate of essays and news articles about the rise of robots in our lives…[that] keeps developing in your head, like a photographic negative, long after you’ve seen it” (The New York Times). Over the past decade, those “essays and news articles” speculating on the future of AI have become our present, with the recent implementation of countless technologies, The Antiquities accordingly expands Harrison’s examination of what this means for human life. A co-production with Playwrights Horizons and Vineyard Theatre.

The Goodman also announces that Namir Smallwood will star in the Chicago-premiere production of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Primary Trust by Eboni Booth, an open-hearted, “utterly absorbing, very funny, darn near perfect play” (The Daily Beast), centers on Kenneth—a 38-year-old longtime bookstore worker, who is perfectly content with his after-work routine: a mai tai (or two) at the local tiki bar. But when his employer decides to close the store, Kenneth must also turn the page and choose a new direction—including some daring steps into a world he has evaded.

Smallwood is a company member at Steppenwolf Theatre Company whose recent television credits include Elementary (CBS), Power Book IV: Force (Starz), American Rust (Amazon Prime). Chicago credits also include Victory Gardens, Northlight Theatre, The Gift Theatre and Writers' Theatre. New York credits include Pipeline and Pass Over at Lincoln Center and the Broadway production of Pass Over. He can also be seen on NBC TV’s Rounding and Chicago Fire.

Playwright Eboni Booth’s plays include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Primary Trust (Roundabout Theatre) and Paris (Atlantic Theater). For television, she has written for Hulu’s We Were the Lucky Ones and HBO Max’s Julia. She i is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and the recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award, a Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, and a John Gassner award.odman, who with his late mother, Edith-Marie Appleton, contributed the necessary funds for the creation on the new Goodman center in 2000.

Julie Danis is Chair of Goodman Theatre’s Board of Trustees, Lorrayne Weiss is Women’s Board President and Kelli Garcia is President of the Scenemakers Board for young professionals.

About the Productions in Goodman Theatre’s 2024/2025 Season
Plays are listed in chronological order by venue

The Goodman is grateful to Abbott Laboratories, Allstate Insurance Company, the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, the Edgerton Foundation, Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust, Northern Trust, and Winston & Strawn LLP for their support of the 2024/2025 Season.

From a ground-breaking, form-defying, laugh-out-loud new drama by a Pulitzer-Prize finalist to the major revival of a Nobel Prize-winner’s utterly domestic, utterly dangerous classic work, Goodman Theatre’s 2024/2025 Season—the 99th year of the not-for-profit resident theater—begins in September 2024 and includes four world- or Chicago-premiere productions, two classic revivals and a new production of a beloved musical, plus the 47th annual production of A Christmas Carol and the 20th annual New Stages Festival. New and expanded complementary programming includes Theater for the Very Young professional performances for children aged 0-5 and their grown-ups. Dennis Watkins’ The Magic Parlour continues into the new season—with Watkins pausing his performances while acclaimed Latine magicians take the Parlour’s stage for an exclusive engagement as part of this fall’s Destinos Festival, in partnership with Chicago Latino Theater Alliance (CLATA). Summer 2025 welcomes the 4th annual Sweetest Season: A Gathering of Indigenous Creativity showcase featuring Native and Indigenous artists, produced in partnership with the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian.

“Our stage is our audience’s space of possibility, where ephemeral moments make indelible memories through big, breathtaking, ‘why-not’ productions of some of the best new plays and classic works,” said Artistic Director Susan V. Booth. “The upcoming season is one deeply attuned to our current moment, a time when how and with whom we connect has never been more important. These plays lean into the beautiful danger of trying to make community in a new place. They ask you to look hard at your closest relationships—and consider what you might be missing. Ultimately, I’m interested in that which brings us together as people. Our 2024/2025 Season is an invitation to leave our differences at the door and surrender to story. Gather with friends. Laugh with a loved one. Relax, exhale away the noise and the daily grind. Let the art on stage transcend and transport us to a place of possibility.”

“Susan’s vision for the Goodman is clear through this thrilling collection of stories that invites bold new thinking and boundary-pushing creativity,” said John Collins, who assumes the role of Goodman Theatre Executive Director at the start of the 2024/2025 Season. “At the same time, it’s exciting to expand programming and partnerships that complement the work on our stages—continuing the conversation into our Chicago community and welcoming new audiences through our doors.”

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