New York isn't theater's only powerhouse, and this Bay Area company shows why
In Bay Area theater's post-COVID worry over butts in seats, budget balancing and company closures, it can be easy to sideline another metric that's just as important: how much new work a region is adding to the art form.
Without world premieres, after all, the local theater scene could only recycle others' successes. In a region famous for counterculture and subcultures, risk-taking and innovation, art here would look like widgets from big-box chain stores.
Berkeley Repertory Theatre's 2025-26 lineup, with three world premieres among seven titles, helps ensure the Bay Area is no mere importer.
And while Artistic Director Johanna Pfaelzer said she doesn't consciously program around a theme, some throughlines emerge after the fact. One, she told the Chronicle in advance of unveiling the company's slate on Wednesday, April 23, is 'Who is America meant for?' Another is thick, thorny familial relationships.
The latter is on ripe display in the season opener 'The Reservoir' (Sept. 5-Oct. 12). In Jake Brasch's play, a queer young man struggling to stay sober enlists his four grandparents to help, with wacky and poignant results. Amid his recovery, Pfaelzer said, 'he realizes that each one of these people exists in their own complexity, with their own pain, with their own sense of joy, with their own accomplishments and failures — and that really he is the living legacy of all of those things.'
Fall continues with 'The Hills of California' (Oct. 31-Dec. 7). Jez Butterworth's play begins in 1976, when four adult sisters reunite as their mother lays dying, then travels back in time to 1955, when that same mother ruthlessly drills her daughters with the hope of their becoming a girl group in the mode of the Andrews Sisters.
'It's an epic play that places mothers and daughters at the center of it,' Pfaelzer said. 'It looks at all of a mother's aspirations for her children, all of the ways in which one can fail in that and the ways in which children love, honor, reject all of their parents' dreams for them.'
Former Magic Theatre Artistic Director Loretta Greco revisits the Bay Area to direct; 'The Hills of California' is a co-production with Boston's Huntington Theatre Company, which she leads.
With the world premiere of 'Mother of Exiles' (Nov. 14-Dec. 21), Berkeley Rep sets its sights again on Angel Island, the subject of Lloyd Suh's 'The Far Country,' which the company produced last year. But Jessica Huang's play is really a triptych, Pfaelzer pointed out, with only the first part set at the San Francisco Bay's immigration station, following a woman about to be deported in 1898. In the second part, one of her descendants works for the border patrol a century later; in the third, it's 2063, and still more descendants seek refuge from climate disaster.
The new year heralds the company's second world premiere in 'How Shakespeare Saved My Life' (Jan. 23-March 6). Jacob Ming-Trent's autobiographical epic poem, co-produced with Folger Theatre and Red Bull Theater, mixes references to Renaissance drama with nods to the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Former Berkeley Rep Artistic Director Tony Taccone directs.
Up next in 2026 is Arthur Miller's 'All My Sons' (Feb. 20-March 29). Director David Mendizábal resets the 1947 classic, in which wartime moral turpitude poisons a patriarch's pursuit of the American Dream, amid a Puerto Rican family.
Mendizábal is also the company's associate artistic director. Pfaelzer shared that this project came about after she asked him, 'What are you hungry for next?
'When I'm in a long-term artistic relationship, that is both the privilege and the responsibility of my position: to get to ask that question to somebody,' she added.
Then comes 'The Monsters' (March 27-May 3). In Ngozi Anyanwu's West Coast premiere, a little sister follows her big brother's mixed martial arts career from a distance, till one day she appears at his door out of nowhere. The show, Pfaelzer said, explores how siblings are 'the people best suited to be the truth tellers of our own sense of our family.'
The season wraps with a new epistolary musical, in the form of 'The Lunchbox' (May 17-June 28), which adapts the 2013 film of the same name. The love story is set in Mumbai, where every day deliverymen whisk thousands of homemade lunches from wives at home to husbands in offices.
In the show, written by Ritesh Batra and Daniel and Patrick Lazour, Pfaelzer said, 'A woman in a somewhat loveless marriage is doing everything she can in pouring her heart into the making of these lunches for her husband … and it ends up on the desk of a man who has lost his wife.'
Rachel Chavkin ('Hadestown') directs.
For subscriptions, which range from $224 to $756, call 510-647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org.
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