Goodman Theatre

Frank Carter famously authored self-help books. But Alice, his 16-year-old daughter, finds cold comfort in his positivity platitudes when he tragically never comes home one night. As she puzzles out the events of the day that changed her family forever, Alice’s relentless search for the facts reveals a more complicated truth.

If there’s one thing Americans can agree on, it’s that 2020 was not the best way to begin a new decade. With guts and humor, punctuated with story and song, Ike Holter asks who we are in a world on the brink of explosion in this rallying cry for our times.

A son returns home to meet his father and reveals how one man’s unchecked appetite destroys both everything he loves and the town that made him great.

Change is in the air as Violet prepares to bring twin boys into the world. Inside her womb, her unborn sons contemplate their future, while the world around her is in transformation: her husband is secretly planning to leave her, her father is slipping into senility and her daughter has taken a vow of silence. Haunting and slyly funny, Smokefall explores the lives of this family in a lyrical treatise on the fragility of life and the power of love.

Willy Loman, an aging, failing salesman, struggles to accept reality and his failure to achieve the American Dream.

Creative writing professor Bella values her solitude but finds herself opening up to Christopher—a reclusive, mysterious freshman with lofty literary aspirations. As the two connect beyond the classroom, Bella realizes she must ask Christopher for an impossible favor. Their story unfolds to a stunning conclusion, blurring the lines between fiction, friendship and endings.

When Suzanne arrives at Ohio State University in 1949 as one of a handful of Black freshmen, she discovers the "safe haven" of academia offers little sanctuary. Decades later, the accomplished writer returns to her alma mater to speak about her work—and unravels the heartbreaking truth and chilling mystery of her life lived in the shadows.

Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable existence, what opportunities he wasted in his youth, his current cruelties, and the dire fate that awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge is faced with his own story of growing bitterness and meanness, and must decide what his own future will hold: death or redemption.

His city caught in a moral free-fall, the Duke of Vienna hands over power to Lord Angelo, who enforces long-dormant codes of chastity with zealous fervor. When a pious young nun pleads for the life of her condemned brother, Angelo’s response reveals a web of desire, deception and hypocrisy that infects every corner of society. Robert Falls’ daring production takes us into the heart of Shakespeare’s dark comedy, in which virtue and vice collide—and lust and the law are inextricably entwined.

A young writer’s life turns upside down when her girlfriend drops some unexpected news. Fifty years later, four artists feel the reverberations of that moment—and its unexpected consequences—as their lives intersect in pursuit of creative passion and legacy. In this bold, imaginative work, Christina Anderson, “a gifted playwright you want to pay attention to” (Variety), dissects the universal act of creation to inspire the dreamers and idealists in us all.