Year: 2024

An aging jaded theatre critic recounts his obsession with a young actress, and how that obsession leads to a journey into a macabre world of vampires from which he almost can’t escape. Starring Johnny Butcher.

Year: 2023

Year: 2023

Year: 2021

A play over Zoom! How times have changed. This play and indeed the whole festival asked for plays that were specifically written for the platform. And it is a play about student debt in a zoom game show format! Can anyone say satire…?

Year: 2021

“another festive 45 minute historical mostly-docu-drama Civil War play,” Lamentations blends music, dance and text to achieve a viscerally accessible performance event. 

Year: 2020

Serenity Hill started life as a play, by Charlottesville playwright Larry Goldstein, that was workshopped and developed in the Hamner Theater’s VPSI (Virginia Playwrights and Screenwriters Initiative.)  It was ready for a fully staged production when the pandemic hit.  Without losing momentum the project became Serenity Hill in the Pandemic, a web series of Zoom calls to and from the residents and staff  at Serenity Hill. You can watch both Season 1 and Season 2 by clicking on the link below.  We are proud to tell the stories of a largely unheard population, our nation’s elders who live in residential facilities, the folks who love them and those who provide daily care.  These facilities have been hit hard by the coronavirus.  Help the Hamner Theater tell these stories and  keep making art.

Year: 2019

Chekov Unbound is an original adaptation of Chekov’s play Three Sisters by UVA playwriting professor and playwright Doug Grissom. Working with Mr. Grissom, an ensemble of 12 – 14 actors and a director and dramaturg will adapt a version of Chekov’s Three Sisters that reflects the community we are living in and the universally thematic world of Chekov’s play, the yearning for something else and the poignance of opportunities missed or overlooked, from the perspective of older actors.

Year: 2017

Comedy of Errors

Year: 2014

A presentation of “the good-WILL-cville project”–that’s “WILL” as in William Shakespeare–bringing you a good play for a good cause! The Twelfth Night.

Year: 2012

Set in the 1940s, Last Train to Nibroc joins May and Raleigh when they first meet on a cross-country train carrying the dead bodies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West.  May is religious and bookish, and Raleigh, having just received a medical discharge from the military, is bound for New York City to begin life as a writer.  When two discover they are from neighboring Appalachian towns, they promise to meet again at the Nibroc Festival.  A charming story of dreams, love, and misunderstanding, Nibroc delivers a timeless message against the unmistakable backdrop of war, reputation, and small-town life. – Dramatists

Year: 2012

Mr Calarco’s presentation of Shakespeare’s play centers on the power of literature over the imagination of the individual. Moreover, he focuses on the profoundly liberating effect which drama can have on the adolescent psyche and how the framework of a dramatic fiction can provide a playground in which the adolescent can experiment with adulthood safely. In doing so, he also confirms Shakespeare’s play, in all its raw intensity, as the ultimate tragedy of adolescence.

Year: 2011

Loosely based on Homer’s The Odyssey, a young New York lawyer, in a state of crisis, travels back to his home in Virginia in order to find his father and heal wounds of the past.

Year: 2011

The Homecoming is the heart-warming story of a family waiting for the magic of Christmas Eve to arrive, told from the perspective of the adult Clay-Boy. We join Clay-Boy as he searches for his father and encounters some colorful characters that expand his growing understanding of the world.

Year: 2010

Shakespeare’s final great masterpiece. A work of magic, mayhem, and mystery. An all-powerful sorcerer’s goodbye to his art. A play about plays, about creation, about spirits and demons, and about a little island lost in a soundless sea…

Year: 2010

One performer, thirteen characters. Funny, intimate, simple, bold.
Come to Cry of the Mountain prepared to enjoy the power of live theatre, the freedom of laughter, the pleasure of a banjo on a front porch, and the desire to save a mountain.

Year: 2010

This is a dream like no other…
Set in Athens High School, meet the young lovers, the lunch ladies, the custodial staff and the IT guy and watch everything fall apart when the fairies get involved…fun for everybody!

Year: 2010

For The Gift of the Magi, Then & Now, Peter Coy has written two one-act plays, both inspired by O. Henry’s classic story of generosity & selfless love.

In the first play (The Gift of the Magi),newlyweds Della & Jim, (Lianna McAvoy & Eamon Hyland) show their love for each other by giving up their dearest possessions. Christina Courtenay is Mary, the worldly-wise neighbor. Directed by Carol Pedersen.

The second play (…the twenty-fourth of December…) is the story of a present-day, not-so-traditional family, April (Jane Hearne), her son Bobo (Alexey Zielinski) and step-daughter Jules (Gabriela Friedlander), the daughter of April’s second husband Greg (Richard Averitt). While April yearns for Greg, who has been deployed to Turkey, the two teen-agers do their best to make Christmas special for each other. Kevin O’Donnell appears as April’s helpful best friend, Declan. Directed by Boomie Pedersen.

Year: 2009

Six women, six stories, six lives –
intersecting in the heart of the Southern Appalachians.

Meet Harlene, whose dog is both her anchor and her best friend, Boojie, whose star-crossed lover changed her life, Nellveda Hawkins, who may or may not be the devil incarnate, Sara Jane, a woman who understands true beauty, Jessie, who should have been more careful what she wished for, and Martha Potter, a woman ruled by simple truths.
As you share their joys and sorrows, these women will touch your soul and live in your heart. (from Overmountain Press)

Year: 2009

This Pulitzer winning play by one of America’s premier dramatists paints a picture of survival in the real estate world of the 1980s, where greed is the flavor of the day and success comes at all costs.

Year: 2009

This lyrical new play by DC playwright Richard Washer portrays a reunion haunted by hints of unrequited love, as former members of a string quartet recall long-ago events, seen from each person’s viewpoint in turn.

‘that’s all there is – music and silence.’

Year: 2009

Love and laughter – deceptions and double-dealings – music and mischief – in one of Shakespeare’s best-loved comedies, Beatrice and Benedick match wits while comic deceptions and dark schemes lead young lovers to make Much Ado About Nothing.

Year: 2009

How far will one man go to obtain & maintain power?
Mary Coy’s experiment in bringing Elizabethan theatrical practices to Nelson County.

Year: 2008

A Shadow of Honor, a thought-provoking new play by playwright Peter Coy, is inspired by the true events of the William Loving murder trial. Set in Nelson County, where Loving and his family lived, the play merges the 1907 story of William & Caroline Ruffin with the present-day story of Kathy and Tyler, who have unknowingly moved into the house inhabited by the Ruffin family a century earlier. The result is a play about history and family, love and war, where past and present collide with a new generation and something has to give.

Year: 2008

The Hamner Theater opened its fourth season with A House in the Country, written by Peter Coy and directed by Boomie Pedersen, on stage for seven performances from Thursday, September 18 through September 27.

Year: 2007

LOVE LETTERS, one of the most poignant romances of the twentieth century, is a bittersweet love story told through the nearly 50-year correspondence of its characters.

Year: 2007

Anton Chekhov’s emotionally charged play about yearning and desire is one of the masterpieces of the modern theater. First produced in Moscow in 1899, Chekhov’s drama of loss and disillusion, thwarted desire and frustrated longing is as potent today as it was at the turn of the century.