Avant Bard | theatre on the edge
Our 36th season launches in October 2025 with the 10th annual Scripts in Play festival—a free, gallery-based series of readings that weave contemporary playwrights into dialogue with classic themes. In spring 2026, Two Gentlemen of Killarney charms with live music and an immigrant love-comedy set during the Great Famine, and Ghost Limb delivers a powerful, poetic confrontation of authoritarianism through mythic resonance set in Argentina’s Dirty War.
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The Robotics of Love and Learning by Germaine Shames
A lonely, overworked medical resident buys a state-of-the-art female pleasure robot, with which he begins an intimate relationship — until his mother discovers the lifelike gynoid sprawled, half-naked, on his bed.
A tender family dramedy about technology, taboos, and the lengths to which the human need for connection may drive us.
Roll over, George Bernard Shaw.
As We Like It by Oded Gross
As We Like It follows the story of a woman named Rose, who tries to motivate her family to rehearse in the serenity and privacy of the woods a production of Shakespeare's As You Like It to be performed at the wedding of the Duke and his betrothed, the Fairy Queen. The only problem is there is no Fairy Queen. There is no Duke. They are not in a serene forest. This Midsummer Night's / As You Like It delusion is Rose's shield against a brutal reality she doesn't wish to confront — she and her family are in hiding from the Nazis in the grim forests of Poland during World War 2. Her family is not sure how to snap Rose out of her psychosis and worry of the danger she puts them all in by not acknowledging the realities and dangers of the world around them.
The play explores the classical theme of illusion as refuge, interrogating whether stories serve as salvation or dangerous denial. Drawing from Shakespeare’s use of forest exile as a space for transformation, As We Like It weaponizes that motif to examine the cost of escapism in times of horror. It asks: When do the lies we tell ourselves serve us and when do they threaten everything simply to make the world… As We Like It??
Thursday evening's performance starts at 7:30pm with live music beginning at 6:30pm
Overcoming Orion by Abby Dunbar
For the last 20 years, Artemis has been running a lesbian bar for mortals in place of her duties as goddess of the hunt. When Iphigenia, the runaway daughter of a power-hungry king comes seeking shelter, things escalate and Artemis pushes Iphigenia away when she goes in for a kiss. Artemis is thus forced to confront her past and the events that led to her choice to ignore her duties. Through memories, the audience learns that 20 years ago Artemis fell in love with a mortal man, the renowned hunter Orion. When Artemis’s brother Apollo discovered that Orion was a trans man, he became enraged and tricked Artemis into murdering her lover.
The play is a queer reimagining of Greek mythology which centers women, trans people and queerness. It emphasizes the importance of community in overcoming terrible grief, and shows us that we will make it through, but not alone.
Two Gentlemen of Killarney adapted & directed by Seamus Miller
March 5 - 28, 2026 I Gunston Arts Center
A timely immigrant love-comedy with music. Adapted from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, the story follows friends turned-rivals from Ireland to America during the Great Famine, blending Shakespeare's wit with traditional Irish tunes and delivering a dynamic celebration of love, immigration, and humanity.
Ghost Limb by Marisela Trevino Orta and directed by Elena Velasco
April 30 - May 23, 2026 I Gunston Arts Center
A timely and haunting examination of authoritarianism set during Argentina's Dirty War that draws poetic inspiration from the Persephone and Demeter myth. When Consuelo's son is "disappeared" by the military, she discovers a psychic link between her injured arm and her tortured child-and races to find him before it's too late.