Productions & Events featuring Luci Kersting

Named one of the “100 plays of the century” by the Royal National Theatre, Githa Sowerby’s rarely produced family drama is a smart and absorbing twist on a woman’s “place” in a male dominated society.

In the industrial north of England in 1912, the patriarch of the Rutherford family has spent decades building a respected glass works company to pass on to his children, without any say from them. Caught between passion, purpose, and expectation, John, Richard, and Janet struggle to break free from an oppressive and narrow-minded father dead set on writing their stories himself. Less entangled by these family expectations and with ambitions to give her son the life he deserves, John’s young wife Mary is determined to upend the cycle, whatever it takes.

Playing on the conventions of the period with wit and creative edge, Rutherford and Son is a play ahead of its time, asking us to question if our “place” in life should be anything but what we ourselves determine it to be.

The estimated run time is 2 hours and 10 minutes, including one intermission.

A hopeful and moving story of loss, love, and the power of faith.

At the dawn of the millennium in a darkened church in northern Uganda, the daughter of American missionaries and a local teenage girl prepare to exchange vows in a secret, makeshift wedding ceremony. But when the brutality of the war zone around them encroaches on their fragile union, the two are faced with a reality they cannot escape. Confronting the religious and cultural roots of intolerance, Cardboard Piano explores violence and its aftermath, as well as the human capacity for hatred, forgiveness, and love.

Cardboard Piano premiered as a part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays in March 2016. The Louisville Courier-Journal called it “haunting,” writing that “this promising playwright’s story suggests a power in facing the damage done and picking up the pieces to inform each step forward.”

Cardboard Piano includes incidents of stage violence, gunshots, water-based theatrical haze, and flashing lights. If you would like more information, please call the Box Office.

This glorious, raw, and bittersweet look at one of opera’s most formidable talents was the Tony Award winner for Best Play in 1996.

Witness a master class conducted by legendary opera diva Maria Callas. Glamorous and demanding, Callas critiques and regales a new crop of opera’s finest. Both frustrated and amazed by the students thrust before her, she escapes into recollections of the glories and failures of her past, remembering her rise as one of opera’s biggest underdogs. This authentic and musically rich Master Class presents a portrait of a fading star who refuses to be anything but unapologetically herself.

TimeLine’s production stars Company Member Janet Ulrich Brooks, a six-time Jeff Award nominee for roles at TimeLine (including 33 Variations, A Walk in the Woods, and All My Sons), where she mostly recently appeared last season as Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience.

Boy explores the beauty of finding love, the complexity of gender identity, and the consequences of the choices we make for those we love. In the 1960s, a surgical accident causes a well-intentioned doctor to convince the parents of twin boys to raise one as a girl. Although Adam transitions back to a male identity at age 14, the repercussions of his parents’ choice continue to reverberate as those involved struggle to connect with each other and themselves, stuck between hope for the future and uncertainty about the past.

The story follows Adam as a young adult in the 1980s finding love for the first time, with glimpses of his childhood that provide a window into what it’s like to grow up in an identity that doesn’t fit.

TimeLine brings Chicago its first view of this “insightful, gut-wrenching, and beautiful play” that is “dazzlingly, deliciously alive from start to finish” (Talkin’ Broadway), and that “has both the white hot issue of gender identity and the simple fact that it’s very, very good in its favor” (Huffington Post).

“If you stick round long enough, the same ideas come round again and again. Wearing a different coloured tie.”

A portrait of a dynamic and provocative woman—the symbol of a nation—as she weathers decades of history and political strife. Every Tuesday afternoon for more than 60 years, Queen Elizabeth II has met with her Prime Ministers in a private audience, a gesture of unity between government and Crown. Through moments of tension, negotiation, war, and unrest, these conversations with political leaders from Winston Churchill to Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher have remained a constant across the years. Playwright Peter Morgan re-imagines these meetings, giving us a glimpse at the queen’s role in guiding the circumstances that have shaped Great Britain, and a window into the mystery, compassion and humor of the woman behind the iconic crown.

TimeLine presents a new and rare staging of this exquisite, internationally acclaimed play about love, math, and how the past and future connect. In 1913, a clerk in rural India named Srinivasa Ramanujan sends a letter to famed mathematician G.H. Hardy, filled with astonishing mathematical theorems. In the present, a math professor and a businessman fall in love. Told in a mesmerizing whirlwind of vignettes spanning history and time, A Disappearing Number is a love letter to numbers, blending the beauty of everyday relationships with the mysticism of the cosmos.

Winner of the 2007 Critics’ Circle Theatre, Evening Standard, and Laurence Olivier awards for Best New Play.

The personal and the political collide in this powerful and timely drama—already a hit in New York and London—from one of the country’s most exciting playwrights (“[she] knows the code for getting under our skins” raves The New York Times). A tough, independent woman in Brooklyn is visited by her father, a former revolutionary in the Black liberation movement who seeks to mend their broken relationship. As father and daughter circle one another, old wounds are revealed, generational differences exposed, and blazing truths laid bare. Morisseau’s smart, entertaining and moving story about family, survival and the nature of liberation is “not only dynamic, it’s dynamite” (The New York Times).

From the Emmy Award-nominated head writer of The Laramie Project, acclaimed as “a pioneering work and a powerful stage event” by Time magazine. This can’t-miss theatrical event goes beyond the headlines to tell vivid personal stories from all sides of the country’s greatest environmental disaster.