2025-2026 Season
It is with joy that we welcome you to our 2025-2026 theatrical season. This year we are combining time-honored Auburn traditions with bold goals for growth. On the back of last season's Resilience, this season's theme, Wayfinding, suits our upcoming journey.
For years, AU Theatre and Dance has offered an outstanding liberal arts based education to emerging theatre and dance artists. We practice intensive mentorship with our students and work closely with them as they find their way. This season, we want to show our students how much we appreciate their hard work by providing a better educational path for success through an increase in scholarship funding. To make this journey possible, we need your help.
This year, we are excited to debut our Scholarship Benefit Opening Nights. All ticket sales and donations on any opening night will go directly to student scholarships. If you purchase tickets for opening nights, even if you ultimately must reschedule your attendance, your ticket purchase will go to the scholarship fund.
While you can always support AUTD through a direct gift when you order any tickets, we also ask that you consider giving on opening night by buying a ticket and/or including an extra donation if you are able.
− Tessa Carr, PhD, AUTD Chairperson
Tickets
- General Admission: $18
- Seniors: $14
- AU Faculty & Staff: $14
- AU Students with ID: FREE
- Non-AU Students: $14
- Online Ticket Purchasing Information
As You Like It
By William Shakespeare
Adapted by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery
Music and Lyrics by Shaina Taub
Directed by Abdul-Khaliq Murtadha and Ashley Butler
September 25-October 5, 2025
Telfair B. Peet Mainstage Theatre
As You Like It explores themes of identity, love, and transformation at life’s crossroads. Exiled Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, journeys through the Forest of Arden, where she and others face pivotal choices. The forest is a place of both escape and confrontation, where individuals diverge from societal constraints and converge in new forms of love and understanding. Shakespeare’s comedy celebrates how every choice—whether to embrace or resist —leads to possibilities of renewal, revealing that life’s paths are full of possibilities.
AS YOU LIKE IT is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals. www.concordtheatricals.com
Small Mouth Sounds
By Bess Wohl
Directed by Lindsay Rae Taylor
October 23-November 2, 2025
Telfair B. Peet Black Box Theatre
In Small Mouth Sounds, six strangers gather at a silent retreat, each seeking clarity at a personal crossroads. Stripped of words, they navigate isolation, connection, and the quiet tension between seeking solitude and craving understanding. Through gesture, silence, and vulnerability, Bess Wohl’s play reveals how people on separate journeys can still collide, overlap, or quietly pass each other by. When language fails us, new ways of knowing and relating can emerge.
SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS is presented by special arrangement with Broadway Licensing, LLC, servicing the Dramatists Play Service collection. (www.dramatists.com)
Footprints
Created by Adrienne Wilson and Jeri Dickey
Featuring the Auburn University
Dance Ensemble
November 18-21, 2025
Telfair B. Peet Mainstage Theatre
This original dance concert invites audiences into a space where bodies in motion trace the shape of decisions, distance, and intimacy. Through movement, dancers explore the moments that pull us together and push us apart shifting between harmony and contrast, stillness and urgency. Each piece becomes a fragment of a larger conversation about direction, and the forces that shape our journeys—both shared and solitary.
Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
A Musical Thriller
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Hugh Wheeler
From an Adaptation by Christopher Bond
Originally Directed on Broadway by Harold Prince
Orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick
Directed by Andrew Schwartz
Music Direction by Brian Osborne
Choreography by Jeri Dickey
February 19- 28, 2026
Telfair B. Peet Black Box Theatre
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street tells the dark and gripping tale of Sweeney Todd, a barber returning to London after being wrongfully exiled. Seeking revenge on the corrupt judge who destroyed his life, Todd’s quest for justice spirals into madness. Alongside Mrs. Lovett, who runs a meat pie shop with a sinister secret, Todd embarks on a deadly mission that intertwines their fates with those of innocent victims. Through dark humor and unforgettable music, Sondheim explores how the pursuit of vengeance shapes and destroys lives, revealing the tragic consequences when obsession leads people down irreversible paths.
SWEENEY TODD is presented through special arrangement with Music Theatre International (MTI). All authorized performance materials are also supplied by MTI. www.mtishows.com
Body Maps
Student-Devised Workshop
Performance with Tim Miller
Guided by Tim Miller, students will create a bold, original piece born from personal stories and collective inquiry. Through embodied improvisation and collaboration, they explore identity, transition, and moments that demand a leap—or a reckoning. This performance will feature the stories of students’ experiences navigating the edge of what comes next.
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
Music by Jeanine Tesori
Lyrics and Book by Brian Crawley
Based on “The Ugliest Pilgrim” by Doris Betts
Directed by Lindsay Rae Taylor
Music Direction by Brian Osborne
Choreography by Jeri Dickey
April 9-18, 2026
Telfair B. Peet Black Box Theatre
In Christopher Durang’s sharp and tender comedy, a group of siblings and misfits gather under one roof, each wrestling with the lives they’ve lived—and the ones they’ve avoided. Old regrets, theatrical dreams, and unexpected arrivals stir up long-buried tensions and surprising revelations. Through absurdity and affection, the characters stumble toward self-discovery, often missing each other entirely. It’s a portrait of what happens when the past resurfaces, futures are uncertain, and the present demands a choice.
VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE is presented by special arrangement with Broadway Licensing, LLC, servicing the Dramatists Play Service collection. (www.dramatists.com)