Avant Bard | theatre on the edge
Our 37th season launches in October 2026 with the 11th annual Scripts in Play Festival—our free new-play development series that gives playwrights the opportunity to workshop their plays with directors and actors before presenting staged readings to audiences at arts venues throughout Arlington. Audience discussion and feedback give playwrights another opportunity to hear how their works resonate as they continue developing them.
Throughout the season, our free monthly Resistance Readings bring artists and audiences together every third Sunday at The Filling Station to gather, reflect, and respond to the pressing political and societal questions directly affecting our lives, the lives of our neighbors and those in communities near and far.
In winter 2027, Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth playfully and subversively explores language, censorship, and artistic resistance under authoritarian rule. In spring, the world-premiere musical Father Lear, a co-production with Spooky Action Theater, reimagines King Lear through the lens of American televangelism, combining an original rock score with a darkly comic story of faith, family, patriarchy, and power.
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Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoots's MacBeth
Written by Tom Stoppard, Directed by Kathleen Akerley
Two Plays. One Rebel Language. Total Absurdity.Tom Stoppard’s brilliant double-bill comedy, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, weaponizes words to create an unforgettable night of high-energy, political satire. Watch as a schoolyard game of coded language crashes into an underground, living-room performance of Shakespeare under the nose of a totalitarian regime. Packed with linguistic mind-games and fast-paced wit, this thrilling production celebrates the ultimate power of art and free speech over censorship.