Dorset Theatre Festival Reveals 2024 Season Lineup

Dorset Theatre Festival has announced its 47th Main Stage Summer Season beginning June 21, 2024, including Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane (June 21 - July 6); Native Gardens by Karen Zacarías (July 12 - July 21); Sidekicked by Kim Powers (August 2 - 17); and the World Premiere of True Art by Jessica Provenz (August 23 - September 7). All performances will take place at the Dorset Playhouse (104 Cheney Rd, Dorset, VT 05251). 

“This season truly exemplifies the way great theater can transport us, from the spellbinding Iris cottage in McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, to the nostalgic Hollywood dressing room in Sidekicked, to the underbelly of a prestigious art museum in True Art,” said Dorset Theatre Festival Executive Artistic Director Will Rucker. “We are excited to begin working with the world-class artists who will travel to Dorset to bring these plays to life. Southern Vermont is an iconic summertime arts destination, and we are honored to be an anchor of that tradition.”

The 2024 season will open with the international award-winning hit play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Academy Award-winner Martin McDonagh, directed by Dorset’s Resident Playwright and Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award Nominee Theresa Rebeck.

In this darkly comic Irish tale, a 40-year-old spinster is good and stuck in the house she grew up in, caring for her aging mother. Their mutual antagonism hits a new level when a first, and possibly final, chance at love suddenly appears. Who’s most vulnerable? Who's scheming the most? Who’s crazy? Is anyone? The laughably dysfunctional relationship of these two isolated souls in rural Ireland comes to a boiling point when the possibility of romance, or even survival, sets in motion a train of tragically funny  yet heartbreaking events. 

“Martin McDonagh’s first play is a terrifying twist on family dynamics,” said Rucker. “And I am thrilled to have this mesmerizing story in the capable hands of director Theresa Rebeck. It will be a masterpiece production, and we are bursting with excitement about the other artists getting involved.”

Playwright Martin McDonagh is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, producer, director, and playwright recently known for blockbuster films like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).

Director Theresa Rebeck is a widely produced writer for stage, film, television, and novels, and the most Broadway-produced female playwright of our time. The two-time Emmy-nominated writer, and the Festival’s resident playwright, returns to direct this season on the heels of receiving critical acclaim for the  New York productions of two of her own plays which were developed at Dorset Theatre Festival. Dig, which had its World Premiere in Dorset’s 2019 season, debuted Off-Broadway at Primary Stages this past August, and I Need That ran on Broadway this past December at the Roundabout Theatre Company and starred Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor Danny DeVito.

The Dorset season will continue with one of American Theatre’s top 10 most produced new plays, Native Gardens by Karen Zacarías. 

Do good fences really make good neighbors? Cultures clash when the new neighbors' plans for a “native garden,” along with a property line disagreement, threaten the perfectly pristine posies and a chance at a Horticultural Society Award for the long-time residents next door. Things turns into an all-out border dispute and no one comes out smelling like a rose when good intentions and bad manners bloom in Karen Zacarias’s brilliant comedy. 

Karen Zacarías was recently named by American Theatre magazine as one of the most produced playwrights in the United States. She is one of the inaugural resident playwrights at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, a core founder of the Latinx Theatre Commons, and founder of the award-winning Young Playwrights’ Theater (YPT), one of the best arts education programs in the nation. 

Next on the 2024 Main Stage will be the powerful "One-Broad" comedy, Sidekicked, a story about the Ethel Mertz you never knew, written by Kim Powers, and directed by Jackson Gay.

Set on Friday night, March 2, 1960, Vivian Vance is in her dressing room about to hit the Hollywood soundstage as America’s most beloved neighbor for the very last time. This one-woman tour-de-force play takes Vance through the heights of hilarity, heartbreak, and most of all, her love/hate relationship with the one and only Lucille Ball. It’s about the woman we all think we knew, but whose real life couldn’t have been more unlike the unassuming, housecoat wearing Ethel, perpetual sidekick to the star.

Kim Powers is an author, playwright, and television writer known for the critically acclaimed memoir The History of Swimming, and has worked at ABC News for the past 23 years, receiving two Emmys for his work at both Good Morning America and 20/20. In 2007, he was selected as one of the “Out 100” – Out magazine’s top 100 most influential LGBTs in the country. 

Jackson Gay returns to Dorset to direct after helming the Festival’s acclaimed productions of Stephen King’s Misery (2023), Wait Until Dark (2022), and Slow Food (2019), which reunited actors Dan Butler and Peri Gilpin, both alums of the hit TV comedy, Frasier. 

The season will conclude with the World Premiere production of True Art by the playwright behind the recent hit play Boca, Jessica Provenz, and directed by Michelle Joyner. 

In this suspenseful new comedy, a wide-eyed art history major takes a job at a prominent museum and soon discovers that her infamously no-nonsense boss isn't the only potential shark in the pond of curators, board directors, and dealers. Now she must navigate a quick-witted game of deception, while deciphering who to trust and questioning everything she knows about art, truth, and her own ambition.

Playwright Jessica Provenz’s most recent play, Boca, was hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “both funny and at times quite surprisingly touching.” Her plays have been produced or workshopped at theaters around the country, including Irish Rep, Pioneer Theatre, Directors Company, and Juilliard, among others. She was Writer in Residence at Edith Wharton’s The Mount and at The Juilliard School, and a two-time recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy award for emerging playwrights.

"Sometimes stars align! This favorite child of mine, True Art, is being launched into the world by this gem of a theater under the helm of the savvy and bold Michelle Joyner,” said Jessica Provenz, playwright. “I couldn't be more excited to see what happens at Dorset Theatre Festival this summer!"

Director Michelle Joyner is an actor, writer, dramaturg, and has directed and acted for LA Women’s Shakespeare Co., Santa Monica Rep, Ojai Playwrights Conference, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Great Barrington Public Theater, The New Jersey Rep, The Daniel Arts Center, and Shakespeare and Co.

“World premieres are definitely our passion at the Festival,” Rucker said. “We are so thrilled to welcome Jessica into the family and to share this new work with our home audience before it goes on to take the country by storm.”

Dorset Theatre Festival also recently announced that its 2023 world premiere production of Still by Lia Romeo will make its New York City Off-Broadway premiere this spring in a production by Colt Coeur. Previews are set to begin April 13, 2024,  with an official opening on April 18. Tony Nominee Jayne Atkinson and Emmy Nominee Tim Daly will lead the cast as Helen and Mark, respectively, reprising their roles from the play's acclaimed run in Dorset. Adrienne Campbell-Holt returns to direct the limited New York engagement, which will continue through May 18.

“Our record-breaking year last season reaffirms that professional summer theater is such a beloved and valued tradition here in Dorset,” said Rucker. “With so many challenges facing our industry at large, we want this season to be about reclaiming joy. We hope this line up of funny, provocative, and suspenseful performances will entertain our community and, in turn, inspire it to help us build a sustainable future for the Festival.”

Casting for the 2024 Main Stage season will be announced at a later date. Subscription sales for the season begin March 20th, and single tickets will be available on April 17th. More information is available on Dorset’s website, www.dorsettheatrefestival.org.

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