(MADISON, WI) StageQ is announcing production selections for our 19th season for 2019-2020. After the largest season the company has ever undertaken, StageQ is pairing back their season with two plays and their annual play festival. The biggest change for StageQ this coming season will be a reimagining of our long-running Queer Shorts productions into a theatre festival taking place over the course of one weekend in May 2020. For 16 years, StageQ has hosted “Queer Shorts” a show made up of a series of short, 10-minute plays submitted from both local and national playwrights directed and acted by various local artists. “After 16 years we felt the time was right to see what we could do to revamp Queer Shorts into something new and exciting for both the company and our loyal audiences,” says StageQ President, Zak Stowe. This year StageQ will launch the inaugural “CapitalQ Theatre Festival!” Wisconsin area acting troupes, high school drama clubs, college theatre classes, and theatre companies will submit and rehearse original one acts, monologues, and short plays all culminating in a weekend long festival. CapitalQ will take over both Bartell stages for an entire weekend of local, original, queer stories.
This change brings a new identity to StageQ’s play festival which fits right into our theme for our 19th season. StageQ’s season will revolve around the idea of identity; how one finds their identity, how identity evolves, and how identity is challenged. Almost every queer person, as they grow up, has struggled or will struggle with discovering who they are, what they believe in and find value in, and where they fit in the world around them. Many queer people struggle to find their identity and many have it questioned by the people around them or are forced to defend it. StageQ’s productions for the 2019-2020 season dive into this idea of finding one’s self.
StageQ’s first production will the Bert V. Royal’s dark reimagining of the beloved Peanut’s comic strip characters in “Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead” A now-high-school-aged Charlie Brown--now called CB by his friends--struggles to break out of his old identity as a predictable doormat while his friends and classmates change identities everyday, attack others for their identities, and struggle to survive high school with their identities intact. “Dog Sees God” will run October 4 through October 19 at the Bartell’s Drury stage.
StageQ’s winter production dives into the question of what happens when you let people into your lives whose identities don’t fit your own and how you try to make them fit into your own. Geoffrey Nauffts’s “Next Fall” takes a witty and provocative look at faith, commitment, and unconditional love. Centered around the odd-coupleesque relationship of atheist, Adam, and devout Christian, Luke; this story goes beyond the typical romantic comedy when a tragic accent sends Adam searching for support and answers from a family whose beliefs and identities are antithetic to his own. Its a timely look at modern romance, and forces audiences to examine what it means to believe. “Next Fall” will run January 24 through February 8, 2020 at the Bartell’s Evjue stage.
StageQ’s season concludes with the new “CapitalQ Theatre Festival” which will run for one weekend on May 14 through May 17, 2020 on both the Bartell Drury and Evjue stages with plays running all day long.