Court Theatre

Oedipus Rex

Oedipus seeks to cure his city of a mysterious plague by discovering the murderer of the former king. Captivating and cathartic, Sophocles’ seminal Greek tragedy brings to light enduring questions of identity, fate, and free will that reverberate in startling ways in the 21st century.

At the back center, a set of large, all-white stairs stretches across the back of the stage. The bare, two-foot tall steps lead up to a high walkway across the top of the flight, with open passageways at the back left and right. Framing this rectangular staircase, vast tracts of bare, glossy-white, trapezoidal-shaped surfaces, the walls, ceiling, and floor of the room, all expand and extend outward and upward toward us, reaching forward to encompass the entire width and height of the theater at the front of the stage, 40 feet wide by 20 feet tall. It’s a perspective like looking down an impossibly long hallway, or down a set of railroad tracks receding into the distance, focusing in on the vanishing point of the staircase.

Berlin

An unforgettable mosaic of intersecting narratives set amidst the decline of Weimar Germany. This original commission brings Jason Lutes’s exhilarating and acclaimed graphic novel to life.

A wide, dark, inlaid stone plaza fills the 60-foot wide stage. Set in a line across the middle of plaza are a half-dozen square, black wooden tables each with a microphone in the center. Two black, wooden chairs with bent cane backs and circular seat pans sit behind each table. The tables and chairs are on stage for the entirety of the production, and are constantly moved around and reconfigured by the cast throughout the course of the show. At the back of the plaza, a series of five dark stone archways, each about 15 feet tall and six feet wide, sit atop thick, rectangular, stone columns. Behind the arch wall, a walkway runs the entire width of the stage along the back wall of the theater.

The Adventures of Augie March

Young Augie March is a product of the Great Depression: plucky, resourceful, searching for love, and striving to grow up and away from home. Through odd jobs and encounters with unique characters, Augie explores what it takes to succeed in the world as a true individual.

About halfway back at the far left and right of the stage, tall, black steel structural girders, regularly punctuated with rows of rivets like the supports for an overhead train line, rise 20 feet high to join a third, four-foot tall horizontal crossbeam girder spanning the width of the stage overhead. Lines of handwritten white cursive script, long, squiggly, curly lines of text, appear across all of the surfaces of this rectangular, metal frame. The same handwriting spills off the girders, across a wide-open, central black floor of an otherwise completely empty space, with a blank, black steel paneled wall at the back.

For Colored Girls, Who Have Considered Suicide, When the rainbow is Enuf

In Ntozake Shange‘s cherished work, a sisterhood of eight women tell their stories through dramatic prose poetry, music, and movement. Told in vivid language, their experiences resound with fearless beauty and unity, despite exposing the unending challenges and oppressions that women of color face every day.

At the back, a series of five, 12-foot tall stone archways, arranged in a semicircle, span the width of the stage, separated by thick stone-clad columns. Pieces of the stone cladding are missing in several places, revealing a rusty, triangular, steel support skeleton underneath.

All of the characters in the play wear one-piece, sleeveless, solid-color dance outfits with flowing skirts and ballet slippers. Each woman is in her early 30s, and wears a different color of the rainbow.

Two Trains Running

Amidst the Civil Rights Movement, August Wilson tells the story of Memphis Lee’s restaurant, slated for demolition. While Memphis fights to sell his diner for a fair price, the rest of the restaurant’s regulars search for work, love, and justice as their neighborhood continues to change in unpredictable ways.

The action of the play takes place in Lee’s Restaurant. It’s a small restaurant with a jukebox at the left, next to two red leather booths lined against a big picture window with venetian blinds facing out onto the street. The restaurant is across the street from West’s Funeral Home and Lutz’s Meat Market, but all we the audience can see out the window is a blue mailbox. A number of old advertisements for jazz musicians hang above the jukebox (Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley), next to a Pittsburgh Steelers football team pennant. A Pittsburgh Pirates baseball pennant hangs above the window, with a number of black and white photographs of Roberto Clemente above the last booth at the right.

• All My Sons
• Antigone
• Arsenic and Old Lace
• Belle of Amherst
• Berlin
• East Texas Hot Links
• FEN
• Falsettos
• Five Guys Named Moe
• For Colored Girls
• Frankenstein
• Gospel at Colonus
• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
• Hard Problem
• Harvey

• King Hedley II
• Lion in Winter
• Oedipus Rex
• Originalist
• Photograph 51
• R&G Are Dead
• Radio Golf
• Raisin in the Sun
• Stokely
• The Adventures of Augie March
• The Island
• The Lady from the Sea
• The Mousetrap
• The Tragedy of Othello
• Two Trains Running