Luna Stage Reveals Lineup For 2023-24 Season

Luna Stage has announced its 2023-2024 MainStage and Studio Theatre Seasons, featuring two world premieres and three regional premieres exploring the world that is and the world that could be. From immigration to artificial intelligence, queerness and familial love to incarceration and extremism, Luna Stage engages with the most vital questions of our time.

Season Passes are now available at www.lunastage.org, at a discounted price of $150 for the entire 5-play season. Individual tickets will be available later this month.

The season opener, the World Premiere of Helen Banner’s Westphalia, runs Oct 19 - Nov 12. In a wild new robotic economy where AI determines people’s right to buy or sell their own citizenship, a family descended from the Pilgrims has fallen on hard times. Will they be allowed to cash out and go somewhere new? Westphalia offers an imaginative, surprising perspective on national borders and our own humanity.

Up next in Luna’s smaller theatre, Luna 2, Becca Schneider’s Trich tells an intimate, surprisingly funny story about mental health, isolation, and forging a path toward recovery. Becca is a teenage girl with a secret in plain sight that no one wants to talk about. Years later, she’s still grappling with the consequences. 

The Luna-commissioned World Premiere RIFT or white lies by Gabriel Jason Dean runs Feb 8-Mar 3. Dean’s brother is a convicted murderer who has become a high-level member of the alt-right. The two shared a childhood, and now struggle to define their relationship in the present and future. This fictional play explores how their paths diverged, and whether it is possible to love someone whose beliefs you hate.

For those who experienced Dean’s pandemic RIFT: A Play Over Text Message, this new piece picks up where the text message play left off. RIFT or white lies can be experienced without engaging with the text message project, but for those who want to participate in both plays, a new text message opportunity will be available in January.

A collaboration between Luna Stage and The Tank NYC brings the National Premiere of A Trojan Woman, adapted by Sara Farrington from Euripides, to Luna 2 from Mar 8-Mar 17. In a flash of modern warfare (Ukraine? Afghanistan? Vietnam? Poland? Hiroshima?), a mother loses her child. She becomes a Trojan woman, compelled to embody every iconic character in Euripides’ classic play. 

The inventive (and funny!) Queen of the Night concludes the season. Ty would prefer to go “glamping” but his father has taken him to the middle of the woods. The night before Ty’s mom remarries, the two men fight bears, their past, and one another, in travis tate’s exploration of masculinity and queerness through the lens of multi-generational Blackness.

Luna Stage is a professional regional theatre dedicated to developing and producing vibrant plays about local and global experiences. Firmly rooted in New Jersey's Valley Arts District – a crossroads of cultures – Luna brings its communities together for artistic events that spark conversations and create understanding and change. 

Luna received the JerseyArts People's Choice Award for Favorite Small Theatre in New Jersey, and has contributed to the development of over 100 new works for the stage, many of which premiered at Luna and have gone on to be produced in New York, regionally and internationally.

As producer, innovator, and educator, Luna is dedicated to eliminating barriers to participation and allowing all community members to nurture their own creativity and vision. Luna offers classes for children and adults, as well as opportunities for early-career and established theatre artists to develop and incubate new work. 

All programs at Luna are pay-what-you-choose to support equity and access to professional arts experiences in our region.

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