Chautauqua Theater Company’s 26th season as the resident professional theater company on the grounds of the famed Chautauqua Institution was one of success both on the stage and at the box office. A highly challenging season of programming brought great rewards and put CTC’s artistic vision on full view. Hailed as a “scintillating production” (Buffalo News), Arcadia was the highest grossing and most attended production in CTC history. One of the American theater’s most revered leading ladies, Franchelle Stewart Dorn, graced the Bratton Stage as Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. CTC’s talented Conservatory shone in a stunningly designed The Winter’s Tale. And CTC/NPW celebrated its 5th season with fully sold-out performances of Alex Lewin’s The Further Adventures of Suzanne and Monica and Kate Fodor’s Rx.

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Chautauqua Theater Company Artistic Directors Vivienne Benesch and Ethan McSweeny are proud to announce the final production of the 2009 season: William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Blinded by a jealous rage, King Leontes falsely accuses his wife of adultery, plots the murder of his best friend, and orders his newborn daughter abandoned in a foreign land. Written late in Shakespeare’s career, this family saga is part fairytale, part adventure and all masterpiece. In the end, the frigid winter of jealousy gives way to the renewal of spring, and time heals old wounds when forgiveness scents the air. OBIE award-winner Anne Kauffman directs CTC’s spectacular Conservatory to bring Shakespeare’s most beautiful romance to life.

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Chautauqua Theater Company Artistic Directors Vivienne Benesch and Ethan McSweeny are proud to announce the final New Play Workshop (NPW) of the 2009 season, The Further Adventures of Suzanne and Monica by Alex Lewin.

In Further Adventures, aging screen star Suzanne Baxter comes into her trailer to find Monica, her new body double, waiting to stand in for her in more ways than one. A profane riff on Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’avventura” with a whiff of “All About Eve,” Further Adventures probes the vagaries of celluloid identity.

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Chautauqua Theater Company Artistic Directors Vivienne Benesch and Ethan McSweeny are proud to announce the second production of the 2009 season: Tennessee Williams’ classic The Glass Menagerie. The delicate glass figures in Laura’s menagerie are not the only things at risk of shattering in this searing memory play that launched the storied career of one of America’s greatest playwrights. With uncanny timeliness, Menagerie depicts a downturned America whose hands had been “pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”

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