Studio Theatre has announced their 2025/26 season slate, which includes several recent critically-praised Broadway and Off-Broadway hits and continues Studio’s commitment to producing powerful, provocative contemporary plays.
The season opens with The Heart Sellers by Lloyd Suh. Studio Associate Artistic Director Danilo Gambini will direct this funny, poignant story about two immigrants finding friendship in a hostile world. Following that will be the latest play from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive): Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions charts the lives of an eccentric family, including an indomitable single mother and her two kids, who both are dealing with the perils of growing up gay in the late 20th century. The show has a particular local appeal: the evictions of the subtitle send the central family to various DC suburbs throughout the play.
Studio will then present Dave Malloy’s unique musical, Octet, which considers the human cost of our relationship with technology played entirely on the oldest musical instrument that exists: the human voice. This “chamber musical” will be directed by Studio’s Artistic Director, David Muse. After that, Rachel Bonds’ Jonah, one of Off Broadway’s buzziest new plays, torques time and reality to tell a tender and surprising story about trauma and trust. And DC theatre stalwart Psalmayene 24, making a triumphant return to Studio after the success of his The Colored Museum in 2024, will direct Ossie Davis’ classic Purlie Victorious, an unexpectedly madcap comedy that offers a look at the long shadow of slavery and a scathing critique of American race relations. Although the play was written in the 1960s, its concerns remain unsettlingly relevant today. And there will be one more show in the Studio season, to be announced at a later date.
In addition to the slate of mainstage shows, Studio will also host a special presentation of The Unfair Advantage in October and November. Renowned close-up magician Harry Milas will offer an extraordinary experience: part magic show, part peek into the world of card cheating, with an audience limited to 35 people per performance.
“At Studio, we do what we do because we believe that it matters, that confrontational and fearless art has intrinsic value,” said Muse in an email to Studio patrons. “And so we intend to continue producing theatre that challenges assumptions and confronts difficult questions.”
Studio annual subscriptions are now on sale to the general public on the Studio website. Single tickets will go on sale later in the summer.
About the Plays
The Heart Sellers
By Lloyd Suh
Directed by Danilo Gambini
Performances begin September, 2025
Luna, an outgoing immigrant from the Philippines, and the more cautious Jane, recently arrived from South Korea, meet in a near-empty grocery store on Thanksgiving Day, 1973. Their husbands are working. Alone in a country they don’t know, they join forces to celebrate Thanksgiving together. Over wine and a stubbornly frozen turkey, these new Americans and even newer friends discuss Soul Train and Jane Fonda, chart the shape of their homesickness, and consider the cost of pursuing an American dream.
Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions
By Paula Vogel
Directed by Margot Bordelon
Performances begin November, 2025
The latest semiautobiographical work from Pulitzer Prize-winner and DMV native Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) traces 40 years and five evictions in a very funny play about a very unhappy family. Siblings Martha and Carl are barely teens for their first eviction in 1962, growing up gay in the outsized orbit of their glamorous, exacting, alcoholic mother. The family’s odyssey through the DC suburbs takes them from one roach-infested apartment to another, and from the Sexual Revolution to the Disco Era to ’90s New Age. A Broadway hit last season, Mother Play is wry, savage, and surprisingly tender, an exorcism as well as a ritual of forgiveness.
Octet
Music, book, lyrics, and vocal arrangements by Dave Malloy
Directed by David Muse
Performances begin January, 2026
Eight people meet in a church basement and lock their phones in a box. This a capella chamber musical from Dave Malloy (Natasha, Pierre, and the Comet of 1812) follows an octet of people struggling with digital dependency, charting their compulsions using only the analog vibrancy of their own voices. Witty, dissonant, and lush by turns, Malloy’s score plumbs the darkest corners of the internet alongside these characters’ yearning for connection. Staged in the round in the Victor Shargai Theatre, Octet asks how — in the face of the many ways to escape into our screens — we can choose to be present with each other.
Jonah
By Rachel Bonds
Performances begin March, 2026
Ana is on her own, a scholarship student at a boarding school, until she meets day-student Jonah. But what begins as an exploration of new and joyful desire shifts into more complex negotiations of intimacy and survival, covering decades in one woman’s life. Critically lauded in New York, Jonah is a story of rage, resilience, and the radical possibilities of trust by Studio favorite Rachel Bonds.
Purlie Victorious
By Ossie Davis
Directed by Psalmayene 24
Performances begin May, 2026
Purlie is home on a mission — to buy back his father’s church and liberate the sharecroppers he grew up with from the brutal segregationist who still runs their plantation. Purlie Victorious features a madcap plot, survival techniques forged in the Jim Crow South, and satiric targets that feel as urgent as they did when the play premiered in 1961 — its 2023 Broadway revival was nominated for six Tony awards. Psalmayene 24 (The Colored Museum) will direct this timely and lacerating comedy.
SIXTH MAIN STAGE SHOW: TBA
Special Presentation: The Unfair Advantage
Written and performed by Harry Milas
Performances begin October, 2026
Harry Milas is a sleight-of-hand artist, magician, and casino security expert. In The Unfair Advantage, Milas invites 35 audience members to join him around a card table to learn how card sharps, con artists — and magicians — fool the world and cheat at cards. An intimate experience with a master of close-up magic. Note: Audience members are required to sign a confidentiality agreement before taking part in this experience.
About Studio Theatre
Studio Theatre is a longstanding Washington cultural institution dedicated to the production of contemporary theater. Over more than 40 years and 350 productions, Studio has grown from a company that produced in a single rented theater to one that owns a multi-venue complex stretching half a city block, but has stayed committed to its core distinguishing characteristics: deliberately intimate spaces; excellence in acting and design; and seasons that feature many of the most significant playwrights of our time. Studio is a values-focused organization that pursues artistry and inclusion, and brings characteristic thoughtfulness and daring to our efforts, onstage and off. The theater serves nearly 75,000 people each year, including more than 1,000 youth and young adults through community engagement initiatives. Founded in 1978, the quality of Studio’s work has been recognized by sustained community support, as well as 78 Helen Hayes Awards for excellence in professional theater.