APT’s 2025 season includes ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Picnic’

By Lindsay Christians | The Capital Times | October 25, 2024

Shakespeare’s most beloved fairy story will unfold under stars this coming summer, when “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” returns to American Players Theatre.

Last seen at the Spring Green classical repertory company in 2017 to coincide with the launch of APT’s renovated Hill Theatre, “Midsummer” will be led by David Daniel, a longtime core acting company member.

“I’ll never get tired of ‘Midsummer,’” said APT artistic director Brenda DeVita. “It is essentially what the audience does when they come to the woods. They come to get lost and find themselves, and that’s exactly what happens in ‘Midsummer.’”

On Thursday, American Players Theatre announced its 46th season, running June 7-Oct. 5, 2025. Five plays will open in the early part of the summer. Another three start their repertory runs in August.

The slate in the Hill Theatre, a 1,075-seat amphitheater on a rural hill, will include the comic return of Noël Coward (“Fallen Angels”), William Inge’s prescient 1950s drama “Picnic,” Nilo Cruz’s steamy 2003 “Anna in the Tropics,” and a Shakespearean “problem” play, “The Winter’s Tale.”

Three plays in APT’s indoor, 200-seat Touchstone Theatre will open with a world premiere of a play by Gavin Lawrence. (Lawrence currently stars in “Nat Turner in Jerusalem” with Jim DeVita, up through Nov. 10). APT staged a reading of Lawrence’s play, now called “The Death of Chuck Brown,” in 2023, and has developed it since.

A trio of comic actors — not yet officially confirmed — will revive Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” about a friendship challenged by a very expensive white canvas. “Tribes,” a 2010 play by English playwright Nina Raine, opens in August. It is set to feature 2023’s Romeo, Josh Castille.

A pair of Pucks, not-so-merry wives

Artistic director DeVita has led APT since 2014. Though the company has quite a lot of casting yet to do, one pair of actors has already started workshopping ideas for “Midsummer.”

“It will be a dual-language Puck,” DeVita said, in reference to the mischievous fairy character. Castille, who is deaf, uses American Sign Language and speaks English. Casey Hoekstra, a hearing actor, knows ASL.

“They created this kind of woven Puck,” DeVita added. “Puck has to be magical, the play has to be magical, and the rules for the fairyland are what you make them. … We had a little showing at the end of their workshop, and they did a bunch of pieces of Puck. It was so good, so inspiring.”

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