2026 PLAYBILL: ARTISTIC DIRECTOR'S NOTE ​

It is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to our sixth repertory season, featuring provocative new adaptations of Lear and Merry Wives! 

 

SitW continues to ground itself in our subversive, queer roots with this summer’s offerings. Dubbed one of “Chaos and Folly”, this season is underscored by a pulsing theme of Love and all the ways we succeed and struggle with it. The desire to love and to be loved so often drives us to do unexpected, and at times unimaginable, things. Grappling with the lack of control we have when it comes to the matter of love is perhaps the most universal of all human experiences. Our Lear hones in on the many complicated threads of both familial and hierarchical love, and the deep wounds and reactionary consequences that follow. Similarly (though through a very different tone!), Merry Wives illuminates what a slippery slope it is when love and insecurity tango together, and conversely, what true, vulnerable, and secure love looks like both in friendship and romance. 

 

In the original texts, both Lear and Merry Wives feel like they exist apart from the rest of the world. For our adaptations, we’ve built upon this feeling of seclusion - Lear is set within a mystical, matriarchal cult deep in the woods, while Merry Wives flips the switch into a heightened, stylized world of queer camp and soap opera dramatic flair. It never ceases to excite and amaze me what can be unlocked from the original text when it's looked at through a bold, new lens. These adaptations have a sense of electric urgency coursing through them, begging us to learn from the chaos and folly these characters encounter, enact, and experience along the way. 

 

As you settle in, dear audience, I’ll leave you with a couple things to consider: What our own world could look like if we heeded Lear’s warning to not confuse love and control, and embodied the raucous joyousness and playfulness bursting from Merry Wives? And an ever provoking quote from the incomparable James Baldwin:

 

"The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see. The people produce the artist. The artist also produces the people. And that's a very violent and terrifying act of love. The role of the artist and the role of the lover. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love." 

 

- Katharine Maness, Founder & Producing Artistic Director

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